I feel like that angle of the game starting off very sparse and difficult before you start unlocking stuff that makes the game infinitely more robust and fascinating is kind of the hallmark of the indie roguelike game archetype. It\'s like with A Robot Named Fight - you get save points where you can respawn once per save point instead of instantly dying, but that\'s unlocked after your first playthrough - where you will almost certainly die without fighting the final boss.
The way I would describe Vampire Survivors is that it\'s like a 2D musou with roguelike elements. And like there are people who might froth at the mouth over the use of basic-ass genre buzzwords or get buttmad over the term \"roguelike\", but the people who Get It will read that and be like \"got it chief 👍\", y\'know.
Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down.
Don\'t look at me; I like a fair number of games that clearly take some elements from roguelikes and still comfortably say I\'m not a fan of the genre. ...I never did finish the third ending for A Robot Named Fight, but what I saw on You Tube had me interested in a sequel I suspect will never come.
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Ideal snack food: eat as little or as much as you want and the price is right!
After seeing a lot of negative reviews lately, I wanted to take some time to say something positive.
Vampire Survivors does have a slow, rough opening and difficulty curve, speaking as someone who never really got into bullet-hell or rhythm games and has a bone to pick with roguelikes. It can be hard to unlearn hitting the attack button, and the first level is deliberately tough at specific breakpoints and the first character a bit underpowered.
But the great thing about Vampire Survivor, at least in my eyes, is the endless feeling of forward progress. Early on, even when you're bombing out, you're earning resources you can use to do better next time, characters to try out that can play surprisingly differently from one another with such simple core mechanics, new items to use that can dramatically alter the way the game plays, and that's just the basic stuff. Eventually, through means I won't spoil, the unlocks take on increasingly strange and dramatic turns, some of them kind of mind-bending, always rewarding exploration and progress.
Sometimes, admittedly, the gameplay can feel unintentionally frustrating when it's trying to cram useless garbage down your throat once you've gotten enough experience to want certain items or combinations of items, and sometimes figuring out what items go together in the DLC is harder than it seems, although there are a few subtle hints in the latter case to make it easier. Individual games do tend to be a bit long, although there are stages designed to be shorter and ways to mitigate this.
Vampire Survivor can also be addictive if you haven't found everything yet; I often had to remind myself to spend my precious hours other ways instead of just killing time with it when I was at my most invested. But that's a good problem to have all things considered.
It also looks great, sounds great, and, despite having a story that's mostly esoteric and implicit, can be very funny and surprisingly absorbing. I do miss some of the old writing, which had a slightly subtler sense of humor, and the old aesthetics, which had a retro charm, but the latter can be easily restored from the main menus, and the former was at least replaced with reasonably funny jokes, speaking as a fan of the writer in question, James Stephanie Sterling. The stories have also become a bit more fleshed-out, if still comedic, through some of the later DLC installments and the addition of Adventure Mode.
Also, while I'm aware that the price I bought it at has gone up a bit as the experience became a bit meatier, it's still super-cheap while offering more hours of higher-quality entertainment than several games with an order-of-magnitude higher price. Every time Vampire Survivor puts out an update I spend a few hours exploring and enjoying it, and every time a new DLC comes out I have a great time. I heartily recommend it so long as you can get through the opening stretch.