Have you ever injected dopamine directly into your brain? That’s pretty much how it feels to play this game.
Games have been getting more expensive lately. Which would be fine, if they were worth the price. Problem is, a good number of games these days just don’t provide enough worthwhile content to be worth that asking price.
Then there’s Vampire Survivors. A little indie game you can buy for five bucks that provides dozens of hours of content. All while being as simple and addictive as a game can be.
How could I resist?
Now, Vampire Survivors doesn’t really have a story. Well, it kinda does. At a certain point in the game, it starts doing some weird Undertale fourth-wall breaking stuff. Which is really cool! But in terms of actual writing, with characters who grow and change and stuff like that, this game doesn’t have anything.
What it does have is a great visual style. Remember the old Castlevania games, like Castlevania IV and Symphony of the Night? Yeah, imagine that, but it’s a top-down game. Hell, a good number of the items and enemies are ripped straight out of those games!
The music is pretty good. It’s got plenty of catchy tunes. Problem is, you won’t be hearing them much over the cacophony of sound effects playing on loop. But we’ll get to that.
My one problem is the frame rate. See, Vampire Survivors throws a ton of stuff at you. Which can make this game pretty taxing on your GPU. There’s a version of the game on Steam that fixes that, but it is present in the other two.
Now, let’s talk about the gameplay. Which can best be described as simple and deep.
Your basic objective is simple: survive as long as you can. Your character starts out with one weapon. With that, they need to kill enemies and level up to acquire new weapons and passive upgrades. Simple.
It’s made even simpler by the control scheme. This is a one-button game. While in combat, all you need to do is walk around; the weapons swing themselves. The only time you’ll need to press a button is when you need to select an option from the menus. You could literally play this game with one hand!
Where’s the fun in that, you may ask? That comes from all the insane builds you can create. There are tons of unlockable characters, weapons, and items. Some of them combo together, allowing you to upgrade them into even more powerful super weapons! Upgrade all of your weapons and you’ll become a walking ball of death!
Which you’ll need to become. This game throws enemies at you by the thousand. If you don’t max out your build fast, you’ll quickly be overwhelmed.
Manage to survive half an hour and you’ll come face-to-face with the game’s ultimate challenge: Death. If you don’t know what you’re doing, this guy will literally kill you instantaneously. Once you figure out what to do, however, this guy will become your bitch!
What makes this game so damn addictive and so damn replayable is all the unlockable content. There is a metric fuckton of stuff to unlock in this game, from gameplay customization options like Hyper Mode or Inverse Stages to extra characters to items. This little five-dollar game is stuffed to bursting with content! Even after fifteen hours of play, I’m nowhere near unlocking it all!
But you bet your ass I’m gonna do it.
Vampire Survivors is great. It’s so simple and easy to figure out that anyone can pick it up and have a fun time. You can easily lose hours playing this game without even realizing it. It is legitimately addictive!
This game is worth a full seventy bucks. But all they charge for it is five. If that ain’t good value, I don’t know what is.
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