Bloodshed is Vampire Survivors meets Doom and it's a surprisingly moreish bloodbath

rockpapershotgun.com:

A long while ago I wrote about Vampire Survivors-likes needing to stop overwhelming you with visual clutter. I've since played a few games of a similar ilk that don't hammer you with a chaos that's impossible to dissect with your eyeballs. One of these is Bloodshed, an old school FPS take on the VS formula that actually works pretty well and did have me thinking the treacherous phrase "just one more run".

Bloodshed's not actually out just yet, but there's a demo for it over on Steam, and it's sort of Vampire Survivors meets Doom. You pick between a lad with a pistol or a lad with a sawed-off shotgun and you're to head into a grim little town with a raging bonfire at its heart. The aim? Survive for 20 minutes against an ever-expanding horde of occultists and demons (at least, that's the one mission available in the demo).

It's Vampire Survivors in the sense you auto-shoot or (if you're holding a melee weapon) stab whenever you hover your cursor over an enemy, though you can manually shoot and stab, too, if you'd like. And as you slaughter the horde, they drop EXP orbs that level you up. Ding upwards and you'll get to pick from a randomly generated assortment of upgrades, all VS-coded fare: lightning bolts that rain from the sky, eldritch traps, spooky homing-missile skulls, better ammo capacity.

It's Doom, meanwhile, in the way it looks and feels. You've got that nippy cornering and the low hop that's frightfully fast. The shooting is punchy, with enemies bursting into green gunge or red goblets that splatter all over the floor.

Both the VS and the Doom influences combine pretty well, making for quite the hurried dash around a map that quickly becomes a ripe field of blood and orbs. I liked the fact that losing or finishing a run meant you could spend the cash you accrued on permanent upgrades, or you'd just unlock new in-game upgrades like the bazooka. I'd say, though, that the pace of a run might feel a bit slow at the moment, taking a while to really ramp up. And