Vampire Survivors review
I know that on the surface Vampire Survivors isn’t strictly about running.
It’s about being a sort of tooled-up magical hero taking on hordes of undead horrors.
One of the things that fascinates me about running is how it’s a sort of metamorphosis engine.
It takes things and turns them into other things.
It turns time into distance, and distance into time.
But running does this for all sorts of things.
Music becomes time, which becomes distance.
The typical New York Times Daily Podcast is just under a 5k.
It all flows together and muddles itself.
So listen: Vampire Survivors is kind of the same thing.
Vampire Survivors is a very pure, very focused slice of action RPG.
You move a pixelly character around a simple top-downish environment that steadily fills with enemies.
What’s it like?
It’s like being an experience orb Roomba.
It’s like taking a terrible conflagration in a fireworks factory out for a nice Sunday walk.
Or it’s like running.
Because one thing becomes another.
And this makes picking a perk or power-up pretty confusing from the off.
Simply put: damage boost or speed boost?
A new weapon or more experience from kills?
Speed becomes damage, experience becomes damage.
Damage which is also, if you think about it, a form of speed.
Vampire Survivors is clearly the purest expression of the Katamari impulse in game design.
The main thrust of the game is all of this stuff.
But there are complications, which make Vampire Survivors truly brilliant, I reckon.
But more: new game modes - hyper mode, inverse mode.
New modifiers for the action.
A map on the pause menu!
This stuff is all great, but the best stuff comes from the weapon evolutions and unions.
They’re what makes one run different from another.
What does this add?
It shapes your path through the game a little.
Both approaches are legit, and both will take you somewhere interesting.
What kind of shapes do you want to carve in the endless hordes of baddies?
Do you want to freeze and then shatter?
How will your load-out handle bosses?
I think about all this as I play.
And I think about running.
