Vampire Survivors, on paper, is an incredibly simple game; You have a character that you move around and it automatically attacks enemies on-screen, of which there are a whole lot. You get new outrageous weapons and abilities as you kill enemies and collect experience, and at some point you either get overrun or survive for 30 minutes, after which the level ends. There are a lot of things to unlock - new characters, items - and mechanics that get introduced as well, so playing it almost always feels like getting progress towards something new, which is incredibly addicting.
At the beginning, you don’t have a lot of options and some runs might live and die with the rewards you get randomly assigned which can be a bit frustrating but this goes away fairly quickly, as the game’s large roster of unlockable characters allows you to start with more or less what you want, with extra systems layered on top of that - like extra items being present on the maps, a tarot card system that gives you some customization on your character, and the ability to reroll your rewards when you don’t want them. It’s really fun to go through the list of unlocks and try to get them all.
I was a bit frustrated by the mouse controls, the game plays well with the arrow keys or WASD, but I would’ve loved for my clicks to move the character in that direction, instead of having to move a virtual joystick around. This is a very small criticism, but as moving your character is about half of the mechanics, it was a bit jarring.
The weapons start really simple, like a dagger being fired at one enemy at a slow interval, but as you progress through the combination, you’ll end up with screen-wide murder beams, being almost invincible and freezing all your foes, all the time. This can get incredibly satisfying and way overrides the bad feeling of one bad run or two. Enemies themselves are pretty simple - bar some quirky bosses - they just move at you en masse, waiting to be obliterated, and everything has this vibe of knock-off Castlevania, it’s pretty great.
Ultimately, I wanted to do everything there was to do in Vampire Survivors, but at some point the game more or less required me to look at a wiki to figure stuff out. Unlocking the last few items became too difficult for me, I had to defeat bosses in really hard levels and after a few grueling attempts, I just couldn’t do it. It’s still an incredibly fun and distracting game, but I couldn’t accomplish my goal of getting 100% in it. That’s fine! It’s really good, you should check it out!
