Roguelike Report Card: Vampire Survivors

My Roguelike Report Card project moves right along with another game created by a solo developer: Vampire Survivors. Originally developed by Italian creator Luca Galante and later expanded to several more devs after the game’s initial success, Vampire Survivors became something of a phenomenon after it was discovered by YouTubers on the Steam store. It went on to receive critical acclaim and received several industry awards.

Vampire Survivors takes the bullet hell genre and flips it—instead of avoiding a never-ending stream of projectiles, the player is the one producing the projectiles into a never-ending stream of enemies. As the game progresses these enemies become more durable, move faster, fire projectiles of their own, and occasionally spawn boss-level monsters. To compensate, as the player’s character levels up they will be able to add weapons, upgrades, and stat-boosting items.

The game will do all the shooting for you, all the player has to do is move around and rack up kills.

Runs typically last 20-30 minutes if they are completed, but can be longer or shorter depending on the level. The game has cryptic challenges that give it a little more juice and adds some late game goodies that provide players with fresh challenges even after they’ve beaten the game many times.

Failure is Inevitable: B (6)

Failure will happen in this game, but it’s not what I’d call good failure. Good failure should teach you something—informing future decisions, highlighting mistakes, and helping you improve your skills. In Vampire Survivors, failure rarely feels that instructive.

In my experience, very little skill is required to win in Vampire Survivors. The difference between winning and losing often comes down to whether or not you were able to upgrade your character quickly enough which often comes down to whether or not you’ve boosted your character’s stats enough to harvest the necessary resources in the early game.

So is failure inevitable? Yes. And failure also helps you progress in that it gives you a chance to upgrade your characters using currency collected during runs. But it’s not the kind of failure that feels particularly valuable or exciting. Often, it just means grinding out a few more runs until you’re strong enough to overcome whatever challenge has been tripping you up.

Rewards Experimentation: B (6)

One of my biggest criticisms of Vampire Survivors is that the combos in the game are limited and lack the opportunity for surprises the way they do in games like Binding of Isaac or Hades. The combos in this game take the form of a weapon evolution system where a weapon is paired with a passive item. Fully upgrading both the weapon and the passive will allow them to fuse into an evolved form of the weapon. Those evolved weapons are extremely powerful and therefore satisfying to obtain, but this system lacks room for more inventive or layered synergies. In my experience, most Vampire Survivors runs amount to little more than picking your favorite weapons, picking the corresponding passive item that it needs to evolve, and upgrading them both as quickly as you can.

If you take one of these weapons or passives, there's no reason not to take the corresponding item to create the evolved weapon.

Requires Variation in Playstyle: B (6)

Most of the characters in Vampire Survivors play similarly: they all start with a different weapon and many have bonuses or penalties to different stats (some have faster rates of fire or slower movement speeds for example), but they all draw from the same weapon and upgrade pool and have the same movement and health systems.

Where this game does require variation is in adapting to the peculiarities of specific levels. Levels that require the player to move north/south will favor weapons with vertical attacks, whereas levels that require players to move east/west will favor weapons that attack horizontally. Levels that send hundreds of weaker monsters at you will necessitate weapons that do area of effect damage while levels that focus on sending stronger individual monsters at the player are better suited for single target weapons. Unfortunately, there really isn’t that big of a variety of ways to tackle individual problems, so while you will need to vary your playstyle, the thrill of stumbling upon a viable strategy is a rarity compared to other games in the genre.

Different levels have different enemies and layouts that may make different weapons more suitable.

Nails the Difficulty Curve: C (3)

In my opinion, Vampire Survivors’ biggest weakness is that once you fully upgrade your characters and solve gameplay patterns, gameplay becomes trivially easy. 

I think this is a flaw in the game’s design: for much of the game, your only real decisions are whether to move, and if so, in which direction. Occasionally, you’ll choose between upgrades or decide whether to use a consumable dropped by an enemy, but the upgrade choices are usually obvious to experienced players, and the consumables are rarely game-changing.

As a result, this game becomes little more than an idle game once you’ve spent enough time playing it. There are a few levels that will force you to get creative and use as much skill as the game can reasonably demand, but the majority of the game becomes mind-numbingly easy once you’ve been playing long enough.

Stickiness: A (9)

How can I give this game an A for stickiness when I’ve spent the last 4 sections picking it apart? Because there’s something obscenely fun and satisfying about mowing down hordes of monsters with almost no effort required. 

Early in certain levels the game will start throwing these jumbled balls of bats at you. You can dodge them with a little bit of skill, but you’re leaving valuable EXP gems on the table if you do that, but if you get hit by them and don’t have the power necessary to defeat them you’ll lose a huge chunk of health, so it’s imperative that you upgrade weapons that will allow you to defeat those bat balls. If you manage to get the right weapons and upgrades, you can walk straight into that ball of bats and watch them all disappear, and that feels good. This feeling only gets stronger as you start to insta-kill enemies that used to take valuable seconds to defeat earlier in the game, and if you manage to get a full complement of evolved weapons, even bosses will prove to be little more than a minor annoyance.

This game is an excellent demonstration in how fun it can be to get overpowered.

As much as I think the weapon evolution design is limiting in terms of variation and rewarding experimentation, there’s no denying that unlocking them for the first time is an exciting moment for the player as you watch this newly created weapon just wreck the monsters unfortunate enough to come into contact with it.

These thrills do have diminishing returns unfortunately. By your 70th or 80th playthrough the thrill may be gone altogether, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself eager to jump into your next run when you’re new to the game.

Art Design: 3

Vampire Survivors is another pixel art roguelike, but the art design is so strong. It takes clear inspiration from Castlevania and captures the horror/adventure vibes wonderfully while tickling your nostalgia bone. The roster of characters is huge and all have a distinct look that will allow players to build a relationship with them.

I enjoy this art, but I do feel like these characters have unusually small heads.

Narrative: 0

There are narrative elements—unique characters, some cryptic dialogue, a few story-tinged levels—but they don’t interact meaningfully with the roguelike mechanics. The narrative is more flavor than substance.

Unique Twist: 1

This game essentially invented the “bullet heaven” genre—a reversal of the classic bullet hell formula. Instead of dodging constant fire, you are the bullet storm, walking through seas of enemies and unleashing relentless damage. It’s a clever inversion, and while I don’t think it leads to the most mechanically engaging gameplay, it’s undeniably satisfying.

Total: 34 (B-Tier)

Vampire Survivors is certainly a fresh concept that has the power to hook new players, but once the novelty wears off I don’t think there’s much to recommend about it. While earlier runs have the novelty of discovery and later runs have the thrill of overcoming once-insurmountable challenges, players can practically sleepwalk through the late game. With a total of 35 points, Vampire Survivors lands in the middle of my B-Tier.