Vampire Survivors Early Access Review
Sometimes the simplest, silliest games sink their hooks into me don’t let go even while bigger, flashier options cry out for my attention. That was what happened with Vampire Survivors, a weird little early access game that started blowing up on the Steam charts despite looking very much like the hundreds of other tiny pixel-art games that come and go every day. What’s novel about it is very simple: it’s basically a twin-stick shooter that does away with the right stick, 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. It’s a clever idea that works for a lot longer than I expected before its challenge petered out, and one that feels like it has a lot of room to grow.
There’s no sugarcoating it: Vampire Survivors sure doesn’t look like much. The pixelated 2D character sprites seem torn out of a generic and long-forgotten fantasy game from the early '90s and are barely animated, with the most interesting part being that some of them do have a nice disintegration effect as they die. It’s as simple as it can possibly be while managing to stay as readable as it needs to be so that you can mostly tell what’s going on during the utter chaos that’s about to ensue.
The three currently available maps are even more rudimentary: the first is a forest with nothing but a few small clumps of trees and an occasional cul de sac that only a crazy person would ever trap themselves inside of, the second is a library with walls on the top and bottom, and the third is literally just a wide-open grassy field that goes on forever. And I do mean forever: on all three maps you can travel in a
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