The survivors are still looking everywhere for the vampire that’s bound to be at the heart of the rising evil in their world but so far its nowhere to be found. A hero is nothing if not determined, though, so each new vampire-free land is another place checked off the list of possibilities as new ones are slowly discovered. The newest area released today as a giant RPG-themed map, The Tides of the Foscari. Like the previous DLC map it’s a massive landscape with distinct biomes, each one containing monsters unique to the area. Rounding out the package are eight new heroes and thirteen weapons and their evolutions, plus a nice new rack of achievements to give all the players who’d had 100% up until now something else to chase after. It’s a whopping $1.99 (on release-day sale for 10% off, $1.79) so there needs to be a huge amount of content to justify this kind of exorbitant expense.
Vampire Survivors, just to fill in the missing details for anyone who might have somehow missed it, is the game at the heart of the horde-survival, bullet-heaven, still-looking-for-a-good-genre-name style of game where there’s one of you, a million of them, and more upgrades than can reasonably be counted to make overwhelming the horde possible. The chaos on screen looks completely overwhelming, but seeing as attacks are automated the game is played with a single stick plus a button on level-up to decide which of three power-ups to choose. Moment-to-moment gameplay is nothing more complicated than “Don’t be where the enemies are”, which is a problem simply due to the sheer volume of them, but knowing how your favorite loadout is going to clear a path means you’re able to usually just kick back and enjoy the fireworks. It’s a weirdly relaxing kind of bullet hell, and while it’s a very long road to get strong enough to survive a level the feeling of incremental improvement makes one game lead to another in a way that can easily kill a few hours. The success of Vampire Survivors has turned this type of game into its own little sub-genre, with a surprisingly large number of excellent games for being as young as it is, but the almost-original (an Android game called Magic Survival was Vampire Survivor’s inspiration) is still the best of them. As of today there’s more of it, filled with monsters and secrets and a whole ton of firepower, but still no actual vampire.
