Vampire Survivors feels like a different game with a friend

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Vampire Survivors with a friend is surprisingly slow. Typically, the indie hit feels frantic as your character automatically uses various weapons so you can defeat waves of oncoming enemies, scoop up experience gems, and race toward far-strung items across levels. The perfectly tuned colors and sounds that make the game feel like walking through a pixel-packed casino add to the chaos.

But when playing Vampire Survivors with my wife on the Nintendo Switch, I noticed that I was suddenly being a lot more thoughtful with every move I made. The game’s new co-op mode forces you to share a screen with up to three of your friends, and that meant my wife and I were constantly communicating so that we could safely inch around levels and use our weapons against the game’s ever-growing waves of enemies.

My wife loves the garlic power-up, which surrounds your character with an energy field that you can use to barrel through mobs. I’m partial to weapons that spit tons of projectiles. Working together, I’d stick close to her so that I could safely launch my bones or axes or knives toward any nearby enemies from the protection of the stinky zone. If either of us got separated — perhaps getting a little too greedy for a faraway treasure chest — we learned more than once that we could be easily overwhelmed.

In co-op mode, Vampire Survivors limits how many weapons you can carry, and I found that changed my approach to the game. In single-player mode, you have up to six weapon slots, and if you know how to build a complementary arsenal, “beating” a level by surviving for more