As an Apple One subscriber, I periodically check out new games added to the Apple Arcade. Some of them, like NFL Retro Bowl 25 or A Slight Chance Of Sawblades end up being terrific games that I spend a lot of time with. Most of them, however, I end up uninstalling pretty quickly and firing up another run of Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Recently, though, I was excited to try out Vampire Survivors+ since it was a game I was vaguely familiar with but had never had the opportunity to play.
It’s hard to really describe the gameplay of Vampire Survivors. Wikipedia describes it as:
…a 2022 roguelike shoot ’em up video game
I think that’s probably as good of a succinct description as anyone will get. The premise of the game is that you pick a character and get dumped into a stage where increasingly strong waves of enemies swarm you. Your main goal is to survive for 30 minutes, collecting items as you go to build up your strength.
The controls are extremely simple and work well on mobile (or iPad, which is what I generally play it on.) You move… and that’s it. Any weapons you get will automatically trigger. Some orbit around you, meaning that you just want to maneuver close to enemies to hit them. Others automatically fire in a certain pattern or target the closest enemy. Some fire based on the direction your character faces. Regardless, you don’t need to ever hit a button to attack; that happens automatically while you walk around.
You can collect up to 6 different weapons on each run. Weapons are typically obtained by leveling up. At each level, you’ll be given a choice of 3 items, so you have some agency to tailor a run to suit your playing style. You also want to collect multiple versions of the same weapon in order to increase their strength. Along with the 6 weapons per run, you can also collect 6 augmenting items. These items do things like increase the damage of your weapons, decrease the delay between weapon effects triggering, increase the your rate of fire, etc. What’s really fun, though, is that various augment items pair with specific weapons. If you have both a weapon and the augment item needed for it, then when that item reaches the maximum level of 8, you can obtain a fully transformed version of it that typically has bonus effects and absurd damage. As you may imagine, reaching this version of all of your weapons is almost a requirement to survive for 30 minutes.
Fully augmented weapons can’t be obtained from normal level ups like basic weapons. Instead, they’re obtained from chests. These drop when you kill a champion enemy, which is usually a very strong enemy denoted by a light blue outline for their sprite. The game turns to pure chaos deep into a run when the screen is literally covered with enemies and you have weapon effects filling the screen constantly.
After a run is completed (either because you died or because you survived the 30 minutes), you get a nice recap screen letting you know of any achievements you may have unlocked that run and stats on how each of your weapons performed. It’s fairly helpful in order to understand what weapon combinations you may want to target in future runs against specific kinds of enemies.
The game also features a wide array of different characters. Each character has their own starting weapon and stats and make them play a little differently from other characters. The game starts with a single character unlocked, and trying to unlock more characters is a large part of the fun. In fact, when starting the game it really just seems like you can stay right where you start on the map and win by never leaving that general area since the enemies come to you automatically. You quickly learn, though, that the various maps contain all sorts of secrets, unlocks, etc. that you need to explore and discover. You could easily play for hundreds of hours without unlocking everything if you don’t take the cheater route (like I do) and look up how to unlock various things on the Internet. The Vampire Survivors Wiki is a terrific resource for that type of information.
The game has plenty of other mechanics too numerous to list out in detail. For example, you collect an in-game currency during your runs. This can be spent to unlock characters or buy permanent stat-boosts that apply to any of your future runs. On top of that, there are also several other modes in the game beyond the normal one, many of which I haven’t even had time to fully explore yet despite playing for dozens of hours. The game just makes for a shockingly addicting experience. Especially for something that you can play on the go, it’s nice to know exactly how long a run will last, too; if I have more than 30 minutes free, I know I can complete one.
While Vampire Survivors is available on a multitude of different platforms, giving it a try via Apple Arcade is really a no-brainer since it doesn’t cost anything additional.