Vampire Survivors 1.0 Review: Idle Action

In an age of increasingly big-budget, AAA video games, it seems unlikely that a game like Vampire Survivors would ever be able to break through. However, not unlike Among Us a few years ago, Vampire Survivors has done exactly that, making a name for and endearing itself to the gaming public long before it even exited its Early Access phase.

I took a look at the game in early January 2022, just a few weeks after it became available in Early Access, and noted how addicting its mostly “hands-off” gameplay was. Has the game maintained its charm after many months of development? Let’s find out in this review of Vampire Survivors 1.0.

Making A Sleeper Hit

Vampire Survivors joins the ranks of great games with only a single-person development team, which means influential titles like Stardew Valley and Undertale. This game in particular was developed by Luca Galante, who also goes by “Poncle”.

Believe it or not, Poncle didn’t initially set out to create a chart-topping video game. His only stated goal was to manage a community, as he did long ago as an admin for an Ultima Online server. His game’s unforeseen success allowed the developer to quit his day job in order to focus entirely on the game, and even expand its scope. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Nostalgia Trip

The first thing you’ll likely notice about Vampire Survivors is its presentation. From its no-frills start screen to the crispy 8-bit environments and sprites of the actual game, Vampire Survivors has been crafted from the ground up to inspire the nostalgia of late nights in front of a CRT and an NES playing Castlevania. Hell, the start screen even features a strikingly similar depiction of Dracula (though still legally distinct), a Belmont-style hero with a whip, and a female magician that you wouldn’t be blamed for confusing with Sypha. Poncle knew what he was doing.

The in-game graphics are similarly retro, with endearing, barely animated sprites populating the screen in increasing numbers. And, perhaps due to the game’s overall visual simplicity, those numbers never seem to bog down the experience. Even when there are literally thousands of enemies on screen, the game continues to run at a steady clip.

This likely has much to do with the game being ported to an “industry standard engine” from HTML5, as the game’s performance in these situations was not nearly as smooth at the beginning of this year. The extra time and dedication the developer was able to put into the game has certainly paid off, and it doesn’t seem like he’s slowing down any time soon.

Survival Is the Name of the Game

Vampire Survivors made a splash with its looks, but that’s not what keeps thousands of Steam users playing the game every day. What keeps everyone coming back is the absolutely addicting gameplay that has only been improved and refined throughout the game’s development.

Let’s say you’re completely unaware of how Vampire Survivors plays. It goes something like this. You select a hero from the pre-game screen (one of 40 unlockable characters), and you’re dropped onto a map. At first, only a few enemies will approach you in the form of bats or ghouls, but you’ll quickly notice that your only methods of input are related to your character’s movement. All attacks happen automatically and aiming them will vary depending on what that attack actually is.

For instance, the Whip attack only affects the immediate left or right of your character in its base form, but the Magic Wand will target the closest enemy regardless of which direction you are moving in. This is just a small sampling of the massive list of 32 different upgradeable weapons in this 1.0 version of the game, but each one manages to bring a unique new tactic to the table. You’re only able to have 6 of these weapons equipped at one time, so finding the best synergies between these weapons serves as its own kind of metagame, which is incredibly fun in its own right.

And…. that’s about it. That’s what Vampire Survivors is. You’ll move around a map into different zones, avoiding a mob of enemies that increases in size proportional to your own character’s level of power. It sounds deceptively simple, and perhaps it is, but it is also ridiculously addicting. The way Poncle has designed the escalation of player power, the particle effects, and even the chest opening animation (which feels like it would absolutely fleece people of their money if he chose to make those chests microtransactions, much the same as the loot boxes in Overwatch did) all combine to create a game you just can’t stay away from.

An Everlasting Experience

It’s worth noting that Vampire Survivors is not the progenitor for this style of game. Mobile games have been using similar formulas for many years now, and Poncle himself has even said that his game was inspired by a mobile game called Magic Survival, a game that also features an auto-attacking hero and magic.

However, translating this formula to platforms that don’t typically receive games of this style and refining it until it consumes players for hours at a time seems to have been a winning game plan for Poncle. The developer has also stated his intent to continue supporting the game with new content “until I – or you – get tired of it”.

That bodes extremely well for those who have bought into the game, especially at its absurd price point of $5 regardless of where you choose to play it. That kind of value is rare not just in video games, but in basically any facet of life in this day and age, and it makes Vampire Survivors something that should be experienced by all gamers. Not just those who typically enjoy mobile games and not those who have a soft spot for the classic Castlevania series, but all gamers.

Play Vampire Survivors.