Looking at screenshots of Vampire Survivors, the first surprise breakout hit of 2022, it’s very easy to be completely confused by what you’re seeing. From a glance, you can clearly see the Castlevania inspiration dripping from every pixel, but that’s about it. Much like the bullet hells that inspire it, you can easily get lost in the large number of enemies and projectiles that clutter the screen. But once you get your first round in, while you won’t understand a lot of the higher-level systems at work, reading the screen becomes second nature.
The pitch for Vampire Survivors is a bit of a strange one. On the surface, it’s most reminiscent of a twin-stick shooter with one key difference: you’re not in control of when you attack. Instead, each of your attacks is automated on a cooldown. As you level up during your session, you can either add new attacks to your arsenal or enhance existing ones.
The rush of going from someone who starts just attacking horizontally with a whip once every few seconds to a whirling dervish of lighting, holy water, and magic bibles is an absolute joy to watch. And while it may sound like it may get too easy as you become an automatic monster slayer, the sheer amount of enemies the game throws at you is more than enough to keep you on your toes.
At first glance, the game seems deceptively simple, but it’s built on a series of incredibly smart design decisions. When starting, I was perplexed at the choice to make the attacks automated, but then I realized it simplified one of the biggest challenges I have with bullet hells. In a normal twin-stick shooter, you have to split your attention between trying to dodge incoming attacks and aiming to destroy enemies. By taking attacks out of your hands, it frees you up to solely focus on navigation and dodging. Enemies don’t shoot, they just walk directly towards you at a constant speed, but it still captures the spirit of a wild pattern of projectiles in a bullet hell that you need to weave in and out of.
This focus is made doubly critical by forcing you to walk over crystals left behind by enemies to gain the precious XP you need to upgrade your character. It incentivizes you to run into the enemies or find clever ways to double back on areas you’ve passed through in order to collect, keeping you from just constantly trying to retreat in one direction to survive.
Equally important as your dodging reflexes in Vampire Survivors are the decisions you make with your character build throughout your session. You’ll start with some basic stats depending on which character you start with, and each time you level up you’ll get a chance to select one of three randomly chosen weapons/items to add to your character. Selecting a new weapon will add that attack to your cooldown rotation, diversifying your methods of attack, but picking one you already own will upgrade it, enhancing it in various ways including more projectiles or extra damage.
Getting a wide variety of weapons can be important because they all operate in meaningfully different ways. For example, the knife will shoot out in the direction you’re walking, while the lightning ring will call down lightning on random enemies. There doesn’t seem to be any one combination that’s overpowered, and it’s always thrilling to find a new combination in Vampire Survivors that feels satisfying to wield.
The art style takes clear inspiration from old Castlevania titles, filling the screens with pixel art ghosts, skeletons, and all manner of supernatural creatures. None of the designs stand out as overly gorgeous or inspired, but the game is very importantly readable. For a game that has so many enemies on screen, they are all visually distinct, allowing you to quickly recognize them and know how tough they will be to kill.
Overall meta progression in Vampire Survivors is handled through a combination of objective-based unlocks and one purchased with coins that give permanent upgrades to whatever character you select. It’s a very smart choice to not overwhelm the player with the wide gamut of weapons, forcing them to be familiar with the starting ones before adding complexity to the game. The coin-based unlocks can feel a bit slow as the costs are high for starting players, but once your runs start getting longer you’ll be unlocking upgrades at a fairly steady pace.
If this feels like a rather systemic breakdown of the game, it’s because it’s easy to explain the nuts and bolts of Vampire Survivors, but hard to capture the feeling. All these elements are very familiar, but the way they meld together into a unique experience needs to be felt firsthand. There’s wonderful zen of watching your character progress up that power curve, but even when you’re in the zone one slip up can make it fall apart in seconds.
It’s still in Early Access, so I’m very curious to see how adding additional weapons, items or characters will create new synergies during play. If you’re someone who’s usually wary of Early Access games, this one has a low barrier to entry: the Steam version is only $3, and you can play it free in a browser on their itch.io page.
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