VAMPIRE SURVIVORS LEVELS FULL

Your first short-lived runs will take place in the Mad Forest map, which could barely be more rudimentary.

However, there’s a long way to go before you reach that point. The enthralling joy of Vampire Survivors comes from getting far enough ahead of the curve that your flailing auto-attacks kill everything in one hit.

VAMPIRE SURVIVORS LEVELS FULL

It’s not as full of surprises as the combos in The Binding of Isaac, but there’s plenty to experiment with. The more you unlock, the more it becomes a game of picking the best options from the hand you’re dealt almost every weapon has a passive ability that it pairs with, allowing it to “evolve” into a more powerful version (the basic Magic Wand, for instance, pairs with the rate-of-fire increasing Empty Tome to eliminate cooldown entirely) so you have to pick carefully to optimize your build. Of course, if you don’t kill bad guys quickly enough you’ll be overwhelmed and killed, but if you keep up a rapid pace of killing enemies and gathering the XP gems they drop you’ll get to level up and pick from a random selection of three or four new weapons and passive abilities until you’ve filled the available slots. If you can make it to the end of a typical 30-minute run that goes to extremes too ridiculous to describe here. The constant and desperate struggle is to keep your character’s damage output one step ahead of the rising tide of the enemy flood, which increases in intensity based on the ticking clock that introduces greater threats every minute. It’s a clever idea that’s stayed entertaining infinitely longer than I expected it to, and even when it does descend into routine and tedium I can feel its pull compelling me to crank up another challenge mode and see how long I can last again. What’s novel about it is that it’s basically a twin-stick shooter that does away with one of said sticks and all other buttons, leaving you to worry exclusively about positioning yourself while it takes care of firing your ever-escalating collection of weapons at the thousands of increasingly spongy enemies that flood the screen. That was what happened with Vampire Survivors, which despite looking very much like hundreds of other tiny pixel-art games on Steam that come and go every day, enthralled me and countless others nearly a year ago when it came out in early access and has kept me coming back ever since. Sometimes the simplest, silliest games sink their hooks into me and don’t let go even while bigger, flashier options cry out for my attention – and then they reveal themselves to be not quite so simple after all, exposing layer upon layer of challenges, secrets, and even more silliness.

Vampire survivors levels