Review | Vampire Survivors - Sink It's Teeth In... Eventually

Vampire Survivors frustrated and confused me.

I can see the game is good. People I know and trust say that the game is good. I understand why those people like it.

But I just don’t.

And I wish I did.

These numbers make no damn sense… Compels me though.

I love games where the appeal is making the number go up. I play Destiny 2 and Final Fantasy XIV, and love to make numbers go up in those. I love having a Cookie Clicker window running in the background while I work that I check in on, look at the big number get bigger, spend some of that number, and watch it get bigger even faster.

But Vampire Survivors bored me.

So many things to do. But for what?

I’ve struggled with this for weeks. I first played Vampire Survivors when I really needed a distraction because I’d heard people say that it was the kind of game that grabbed them and wouldn’t let them go. Instead, I sat there, walking my little guy in circles around the screen and thinking “Is this it?” And yep, that was it.

Vampire Survivors is in a weird middle space between idle game and involved video game. The only thing, and I mean the only thing the player has control over is the character’s movement. Attacks come out automatically and spells are thrown out on a cooldown, so the only thing the player has to do is move the character around so that their attacks hit the enemies, and the enemies don’t hit them. Collecting enough of the experience points that drop from enemies causes your character to level up and pops up a menu that lets you choose new weapons and power-ups, which are also all automatic. I can absolutely understand why someone might find this gameplay loop compelling and worth playing for hours on end. But for whatever reason, it just didn’t grab me.

I couldn’t figure out why. Was the start of the game just slow? That couldn’t be it, since everyone I have heard discuss the game have largely said that the game grabbed them right from the start. Is something about the game bad? No, on a technical level the game is amazing. The art is great, with its pixelated style, and the Castlevania-esque music is catchy enough that it doesn’t get annoying over the many repeated runs that I did.

Ok but what if the soundtrack had Barkerville on it?

So that settles that, the game is good. But, if the game is good, and I can feel and appreciate it’s good, then what was the problem?

I still don’t know.

It could be that I’ve been playing it on Xbox Game Pass on my TV in my living room, as a lot of the praise I’ve heard about the game has been that “It’s great on Steam Deck,” (which amusingly echoes the common, and largely worn-out phrase, “It’s great on Switch.”). To be sure, Vampire Survivors seems tailor-made for a handheld system. Runs are 30 minutes at most, and the upgrades come fast enough that I can understand how even a five or ten minute run before a death can be satisfying for some. 

I don’t like to speculate on developer intention, but Vampire Survivors seems like it was made to be played one or two runs at a time on a handheld, and then put down for a while. And that’s just not how I like to play games.

Vampire Survivors is not a bad game, I can clearly see that. Which makes it all the more frustrating to me that I don’t like it. Maybe if I ever get my hands on a Steam Deck…

Long lad.

A Few Days Later:

So, The Game Awards happened and, Vampire Survivors received a surprise release for free on mobile devices and I'd just like to say, I get it now. On a mobile device, Vampire Survivors shines. It's so easy to pull up, play for a little bit, then put down and get on with something else. The mobile interface is great as well. It can be played in landscape, or in portrait so it's easy to play one-handed, and I've been loving being able to pull it up and do a run whenever.