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Vampire Survivors is a smash hit horde mode game

Vampire Survivors is a horde mode game with basic, wide layouts. You choose a character from a list of Belmont-likes and try to withstand a swarm of ghoulies and ghosties that grow in power and quantity over the course of a 30-minute period.

The first major surprise in Vampire Survivor is how it handles shooting. Each weapon has a distinct mechanical design, with varying AoEs, firing speeds, and damage profiles. Rather of simply targeting foes, the weapons have a timed fire pattern that is impacted by your and your opponents’ placement.

What makes it unique is that it’s essentially a twin-stick shooter that removes one of the sticks and all other controls, forcing you to focus solely on placing yourself as it fires your ever-escalating arsenal of weaponry against the thousands of increasingly squishy foes who flood the screen.

It’s a great notion that can keep you entertained for far longer than you may anticipate, and even when it does devolve into routine and boring, you can feel its pull urging you to activate another challenge level and see how long you can endure.

There are various characters to pick from, including Arca Ladonna. He begins with a pretty punishing early game weapon: a wand that fireballs at a random adversary on screen once per second or two. You have no control over where these fireballs fly, so you must follow them in whichever route they clear through the already cramped masses of foes, snagging level-up jewels along the way.

The barely rendered pixelated 2D character sprites appear to have been ripped from a generic and long-forgotten fantasy game from the early 1990s, with the only fascinating feature being that some of them actually have a lovely disintegration effect when they die.

vS1It’s as simple as it can be while yet remaining readable enough to let you know what’s going on throughout the absolute pandemonium that’s about to unfold. It goes without saying that if you live long enough, your screen will be swamped with so many adversaries and trippy weapon effects that it will be nearly hard to determine what’s going on. But living on the border is exciting.

With six weapons fully improved and at least a couple of them evolving through item combinations, your character simply fires a steady barrage of projectiles against an infinite wave of enemies. At this point, it virtually plays itself, but that’s part of the pleasure.

A large percentage of enemies just move toward you until they die; the only things that differentiate them are their speed, the amount of damage they deal if they catch you, and the amount of damage they take before they pass out.

VS3This is true of both bats at the start of a run and the mummies, witches, werewolves, and dozens of other monster types that appear later. Almost none of them fire their own projectiles at you, which is fortunate because there are already so many on the screen at once that it would likely rapidly become overwhelming.

They are essentially simply heat-seeking missiles with hitpoints. Even the “bosses,” such as the egg-dropping wraiths who pursue you when you acquire some special goods, are largely just bigger copies of common opponents with much increased hitpoint pools; they seldom possess any unique abilities.

VS4The game’s enormous replayability and enjoyment come from putting together builds of abilities that work well together, and seeing your character deal so much damage is a satisfying reward for surviving long enough to reach the point where you could figuratively walk away from the controls and still make it to the end. Vampire Survivors appears to be a smash hit thanks to its dead-simple graphics, straightforward map, and enemy design.

Harry S

harry

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