Vampire Survivors

7 November, 2024 - 3:04 pm by Joseph Whitfield
About 9 mins to read
Reviewed on: PS5

My wife and I were walking the event floor of the 2023 WASD show when a man in an exquisite suit thrust a foam garlic bulb into my hands. My first reaction was to look confused, but I gathered myself and said “Thank you?” with my voice pitching up at the question mark. I looked around for a game that could be garlic-related and then I saw a huge Vampire Survivors logo across one of the stands. As I put together the joke, it seemed everyone in the convention was huddled around the four screens where Poncle was demoing the game. The crowd certainly tempered my excitement but thanks to the ridiculously oversized banner telling me that the game was available on Xbox Game Pass, I downloaded it, ready to play when I got home.

After a day of trudging around the expo and thoroughly enjoying myself, we arrived home and, as is tradition, the TV went on for some background noise. In a funny twist of fate, we turned to the BBC where they were showing the BAFTA Game Awards. I thought nothing of it until, towards the end of the program, a chap in a sharp suit took to the stage to accept an award. It was the same guy who hours earlier had handed me a foam garlic bulb! Confused about how an indie game could beat out the likes of God of War Ragnarok, I booted up the Xbox and sunk 6 straight hours into Vampire Survivors.
Since its PC release in 2021, the small team at Poncle (with a little help from Konami) have produced a game that has grown from indie darling to a bonafide phenomenon, up there with the likes of Stardew Valley, Among Us and Undertale. Now in 2024, we see Vampire Survivors conquer the last remaining hurdle, the PlayStation family of consoles. While the game doesn’t currently have any vampires to talk about, it does come with all of the previously released DLC.

At a Glance

Positives	Negatives
+ Simple, arcade-style concept + Addictive gameplay + Hundreds of things to unlock	– No vampires – Characters can get lost in the battle – Random weapon generator can get a bit samey
Available on:	Nintendo Switch PC (Steam) PlayStation Xbox iOS Android
Find out about our scoring policy here

The concept of Vampire Survivors is very simple, you pick a hero and are plonked into a large map where you have to survive an onslaught of enemies for 30-minutes. To begin with, you’re given one weapon to defend yourself against a barrage of baddies that shamble towards you. As you slice through baddies, you earn gems that level up the character, and unlock additional goodies to help you progress. Upgrading is vitally important because as the minutes tick by, the enemies will ramp up both in numbers and difficulty. Before you know it, you’ll soon be overwhelmed with the sheer volume of enemies. At around the 25-minute mark, I actually couldn’t see the ground for the various bats, skeletons and strange golem creatures filling up the screen. It is easy to get lost in the later stages of the game but luckily, Poncle’s arcade-style approach means that if you strategise which weapons to pick up, then the more enemies you can clear and complete the level.

To begin, you’ll start with a character armed with a whip that damages enemies on either side of him. (I’ve been assured that this bloke definitely doesn’t resemble Simon from Castlevania, but his 8-bit styling and animations say otherwise.) Once you’ve picked your character, it’s over to the stage selection screen where you can choose from a handful of maps that are presented in a retro, top-down style that reminds me of the SNES/Mega Drive era. I’m a sucker for games that are inspired by older games, so Vampire Survivor’s aesthetic ticked a lot of boxes for me. Every map is unique and feels distinct from the others, and although there is a certain amount of secrets and tomes to find, there is no pressure to do so.

If you did want to spice things up, exploration and persistence are where Vampire Survivors comes alive. By levelling up, finding hidden items across each map and completing challenges will lead you to unlock more characters, more weapons and even more maps to play on. Your collection of stuff will be as plentiful as a blood bank to a vampire. As you and not-Simon attempt the first few rounds, you’ll quickly build up an arsenal containing a Holy Bible which spins around with such veracity that enemies crumble at its touch, a magic wand that incinerates everything in random directions, and a bulb of garlic that not only keeps enemies at bay thanks to its stinky forcefield but also looks like a pair of pale testicles (which may or may not also have its own stinky forcefield).

The more you unlock, the crazier the weapons get, such as two cats that randomly scrap like a Hanna Barbera cartoon or a mine cart that zips from left to right. Each weapon has an opposite number, so if you get the right pairing, you can merge them and produce something even more powerful. For example, if you pair the ~~balls~~ garlic with a heart that regenerates your health, you can unlock a superpowered force field that eviscerates everything within the circle. The great thing is that these items are found randomly with each level up, so you never know what you can get… Except that’s to a point. After several hours, and with most of the equipment unlocked, it felt like Vampire Survivors settled into a rhythm of producing the same stuff over and over again, with me having to reroll the equipment until what I wanted showed up.

This is a slight bone of contention but by the time I got to this point in the game, the number of rerolls I was allowed to deploy meant it wasn’t a problem. I can imagine that this problem occurs as the DLC available greatly improves what is on offer, bundling in more challenges, weapons and maps than you can shake a stick at. For the PlayStation release, the DLC doesn’t come as standard, but each release so far has been sold for between £2-£4, so it doesn’t break the bank either. There’s a variety of stuff to choose from as well, be it Poncle’s content which follows the base game’s queues, to mashup DLC like the Among Us crossover, which unlocks the famous airship for you to run around to cause havoc. While it’ll be up to each player to decide if they want to expand Vampire Survivors beyond the base game, I can safely say that the arcade experience remains intact for each expansion and is perfect for those quick playthroughs.

Except for having no actual vampires in the game (for now!), Vampire Survivors is one of those games that knows what it’s trying to do and does it well. The hundreds of unlockable characters, weapons and maps will keep you engaged for hours, but if you want 30-minutes to yourself to let out some anger, you can do that too. Admittedly, the random weapon generator isn’t very random and as more things unlocked, the more my weapon pool ended up being very similar on each run, but that’s just a small gripe in the grand scheme of things. Vampire Survivors is an arcade game packed full of things to do and just when you think you’ve had your fill, the game will somehow drag you back for one more game. Vampire Survivors is one game that I can fully get behind and would recommend to everyone… except vampires.