I was looking to scratch a itch, specifically a shmup or bullet hell itch on Game Pass when I stumbled on Vampire Survivors. The game is still in preview mode, meaning it’s still a work-in-progress but after 3 hours of being transfixed by it, there’s no doubt about its addictive gameplay.

What’s a Shmup?

Before we get into more Vampire Survivors, some of you may be asking what’s a shmup? Well, it’s a portmanteau of shoot ‘em up and these games generally have large number of enemies and you’ll have to dodge whatever they are shooting at you (hence the other name, bullet hell).

Most shmups typically involve piloting an aircraft (or spaceship) featuring some form of continuous scrolling movement. Games such as Raiden and Danmaku Unlimited come to mind. I remember playing Tiger-Heli in the officers’ club in the navy base as a kid, and that was Japanese game maker Toaplan’s first shmup ever.

Is Vampire Survivor a Shmup?

It depends on who do you ask that question. To me, I consider it a shmup, as it does have the elements of enemies swarming you. The objective of Vampire Survivor is to survive as long as you can, and there’s a timer right at the top of the screen to show just how long you’ve been surviving. There’s only a single, expansive 2D map, rendered (along with everything else) in 2D retro, in which your character roams around facing hordes of enemies consisting of the undead. And while you don’t have a trigger button to press, the game auto-fires whatever weapons your character is carrying.

All You Need is Kill

Killing enemies can cause them to drop gems, which can be picked up to gain experience, which will cause your character to level up. Each time you level up, you get to choose from a set of 3 options, be it a new weapon, upgrading an existing weapon or gain a new ability. The game doles out this list of options randomly each time you level up, so if you are lucky, you might get a good mix of offensive and defensive skills the longer you survive in that particular session.

Tougher enemies will sometimes drop treasure boxes, and this will reward players with coins on top of an upgrade or a new ability. Coins are useful at a meta-game level as you can use them to unlock new characters in the character selection screen, or purchase power-ups so that your character can have a leg-up every time they start a new level.

Character Selection

The game starts off by allowing you to select the first out of 4 possible characters, each with their own abilities. The first character, Antonio, deals out more damage for every 10 levels of experience gained, while the second characer, Imelda, generates more experience for every 5 levels of experience gained.

I’m sticking with Antonio at the moment, nevermind that he looks to be inspired by one of the Belmonts from the Castlevania games, I just prefer to spend my hard-earned gold coins to purchase power-ups instead.

How Bout Some Tips?

My best time on Vampire Survivors is about 13 minutes, and my entire playthrough yesterday lasted nearly 3 hours (so guess how many rounds I went trying to survive the maddening horde in the game).

What worked best for me would be to go with an really offensive approach, assuming that the game’s random list of upgrades every time I level up plays nice with me. Things like an extra whip, knifes, holy water, floating Bible, plus upgrades to enhance area damage and reduce weapon cooling-off period, are my shtick.

Due to the swarming nature of the enemies, you’ll need to be ready to cut a path through the horde of enemies, and preferably don’t get unstuck by tougher, higher HP enemies. At some point in the game, the enemies will attempt to directly encircle you. You can opt to either aim for a break through the encirclement, or survive until those encircling monsters disappear.

The game will helpfully indicate where treasure boxes are located (this happens after you’ve killed a particularly tough enemy), so do always try to get to the treasure boxes as this will help provide coins to unlock power-ups.

Verdict

Don’t let the retro graphics fool and its current work-in-progress status fool you, Vampire Survivors is an excellent time-sink due to its addictive gameplay. We rate it at a 4/5.

The game is available on Game Pass Ultimate for the PC for free, or you can pay for game on Steam.

Rig

The rig that I’m using to check out Vampire Survivors consists of the following:

  • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
  • 32GB RAM
  • Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti