Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde is a game akin to Vampire Survivors where you do a bunch of runs with varied characters, weapons and upgrades in order to collect currencies, unlock new content, and progress. I really tried to give it a fair shot and played about twenty five hours of it before ultimately giving up; some of the design decisions made are a bit iffy for a game of that genre, but it’s still pretty neat, with a vibrant artstyle and a lot of game to go through.
I was immediately a bit shocked by the lack of features around the core of the game, everything is explained via screenshots of the game with annoted text (and not through gameplay), there are no options to change controls or anything like that, amongst other things. You start your runs by picking a hero from a set of eight, all with their passive and active abilities, and a weapon from a set of fourteen, all of which do wildly different things. There are ‘synergies’ between heroes and your starting ability, but overall besides the very obvious special charactertistics of each hero, their stats and skill synergy didn’t seem too meaningful to me.
While in runs, you defeat waves after waves of colorful and numerous foes to level up your skills by purchasing various upgrades to increase speed, range, damage, and other effects - later on you can unlock advanced skills that are even more potent - unlock pets with passive abilities, gather currency from shops, chests and rocks, then fight bosses after a set timer has passed. Your characters have active abilities that can be triggered in various ways, as simple as a cooldown or something limited through a strage, or even based on the money you own. I liked the weapon variety, although some are really slow and don’t feel great to use, especially with the number of enemies that can get overwhelming.
Something I realy enjoyed here are the challenge runs; each character has ten different runs in specific levels with a specific objective of skills, pets and upgrades to get, these talked to me much more than just doing random runs with no other goal than to defeat the boss. You use all the resources, stage completion, enemy defeats to unlock and purchase nodes on a big skill tree that governs pretty much everything in the game, from unlocking new characters to whole difficulty levels, I think this is a great way of doing it.
What turned me off from continuing the game was enemies immune to certain types of damage, I’m not sure why, but certain bosses just were immune to poison or other elemental effects, in certain kind of games this is totally fine, but when you’re trying to mow down infinite foes with flashy moves strategy goes off the window, or when you’re going on a challenge that requires you to fight a specific boss with a specific build they’re mostly immune to, things get really frustrating. This might’ve been on me, but after twenty five hours I thought I understood how the game worked pretty well.
Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde is pretty neat, if you’re jonesing for a game of that style, it’s not bad! Be ready for a lot of potentially frustrating trial and error at some point tho!
