Review | Vampire Survivors: Legacy Of The Moonspell - Entranced In Chaos
It would be safe to say that the rogue-lite Vampire Survivors sank its fangs deeply into me as soon as I started playing. As someone who picked up the game during the early days of its Early Access development, I felt this vampiric game’s seduction pulling me in every time there would be an update to the game. Each addition of new content made me long for the night to come, so I could descend into reverse bullet hell and consume the latest additions. As the sun has now set on its Early Access period and the 1.0 version of the game has been released, so let us also put a stake in these puns’ hearts and talk about the game properly.
Vampire Survivors has a lot of things going for it, even outside of the game itself. Coming out of nowhere by indie developer poncle, you can’t help but admire the success the tiny team has found with not only staggering sales but being rewarded by being put on numerous publications’ and personal Game Of The Year lists. As the studio’s banner year ends, poncle is releasing its first paid DLC expansion, Legacy of the Moonspell. Like the main game, this expansion won’t drain your life force or suck your wallet dry. Okay, last vampire pun, I promise.
Damn, this Steam version of Dwarf Fortress is wild.
Legacy of the Moonspell introduces a large new stage that includes a fair amount of variation. In previous locations like the Dairy Plant or Gallo Tower, there were items to retrieve, but the journey between them offered no changes in the scenery. With the new stage, Mt. Moonspell, players will enter an Asian-inspired locale that includes a village with beautifully carved gates, a mountain with a set of caves to get lost in, and a castle with mazes inside.
Keeping with the theme, the new enemies include little demons with rice hats, yokai that look straight out of a painting, and a fearsome-looking Japanese badger. Not only does this new stage provide you with lovely new things to look at and foes to slay, but a lot of the enemies are area exclusive. I saw corrupted villagers in the rice fields, and in the castle, I came across a large skeleton mid-boss. All this variety helps the runs in this DLC feel unique and inspired me to check out each corner of the map to try and find everything. Exploring caves or investigating inside the houses in the village is something that I hope future additional maps in Vampire Survivors explore further as it could be something to break up the slaying. The new music is nice and adds a new layer to the game’s already expansive soundtrack, with traditional-sounding Asian instruments. However, one of the new weapons has a very grating sound, so it might be best to stick to the podcasts while playing.
If Far Cry 4 has taught me anything. Never pick a fight with a badger.
All of the DLC’s new characters each come with exciting new weapons. Miang’s healing sword throws out orbs to damage enemies. Syuuto has a claw that will create slashes on the ground that provide damage over time. Menya has a weapon that will cause an explosion on screen and give you momentary invincibility and a burst of speed. Then there is Babi-Onna, who arrived on the scene with what might be my favourite weapon in the entire game; a kimono that causes multiple copies of the character to spring up and damage enemies as they run into the clones. These characters feel full of personality from their weapons to their design, especially Babi, who will strike poses before throwing clones, complete with her signature fan accessory. There is also a life-stealing sword somewhere out there on the map for you to nab, and all weapons can evolve with the passive upgrades that we have seen before.
The new map is massive and going out to gather all the needed upgrades to evolve weapons is fun and engaging. However, one of the arcana (a buff that you can select at the start of the run) can stifle the whole experience as it will pull all items on the map to the player, immediately squashing any need to search these items out. While you can be disciplined and not select this arcana, its presence quickly robs the map of its intrigue and instils a feeling of “why bother running all over the place if I can just get everything right now.”
Everybody VOGUE! VOGUE! VOGUE!
Another issue that exists right now is the end of a run. In previous stages, Death would come for you once you hit the 30-minute mark and quickly kill you. If you had the right build, you could fight back and even kill Death before more Deaths would come, and force an end to the run. However, things immediately end in Mt. Moonspell when you hit the half-hour mark. Just a sudden “game-over”. Being able to push back against the living incarnation of death and your inevitable demise, was always a draw for me and a way to show just how overpowered my character had become. Sadly though, that exhilarating final dance with death isn’t here on the new map. I hope this is something the developers will address, and as much as the team has listened to feedback in the past, I hope poncle tackles this first.
That being said, these critiques are minor considering the rest of the package is as top-notch as anything else you’d find in the base game. Vampire Survivors was already a steal at £3.99, and considering what is added to the game for just £1.99 feels like poncle is spoiling us right before the holidays.
I also really appreciate the fact that the DLC arrived just weeks after a large free update. If poncle keeps adding small things for free, while future paid content centres around a cohesive theme like Legacy of the Moonspell does, then I am all for it. I think there is a level of mechanical depth that Legacy of the Moonspell is starting to toy with inside the framework of the base game, and I hope this is a sign of things to come, as quests and objectives could breathe even more life into a game that already has heaps of things to do.
