Vampire Survivors and other top-down arcade shooters (VS discussion now forbidden)

[Justinian]

Oh well, gladly played through the game w/o seeing any of the so called "lore".

3h on endless, just left the game running by itself. Peak gameplay right here, eh.

Is that a separate mode? Today I unlocked the library, went in the new level and basically cleared it first try... When I hit 30 min of gameplay, all enemies despawned, death spawned in and one-shot me, ending the game. Is this how this is supposed to work?

you eventually unlock weapons that can kill Red Death, only to be killed by a different, Grey Death.

 

[Haba]

Yeah. Endless is pretty worthless as it is, the game can't handle life beyond 30 minutes. Making enemies stronger only goes so far.

Spoiler

The inverse mode reaper rush at the last minute is pretty brutal. Thankfully the run finally ended there, was having 600% slowdown even with everything disabled...

But yeah, I think I am done here. 60 hours for a couple of bucks, I'd say that is pretty O.K.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I'd forgotten about this game for a while until I visited a friend and noticed he'd gotten it on Xbox and wanted help beating some levels.

Anyways, I checked on it today on my computer machine and it seems they did an update and now there are new achievements and zones.

I ran through a lot of them, but check it out if you get bored.

There is more stuff to do.

Simple as.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I was recommended this game by Gregz



It's the most Vampire Survivors like game I've played from all the recommendations in this thread so far.

The game is no where near as complex as VS, but its fun so far. Give it a shot if you want something new to try.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

^ Oh it's by the people who did Ziggurat, cool.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

Hi I came here to discuss Vampire Survivors

 

[†††]

Hi I came here to discuss Vampire Survivors

My favorite part of the game is when you do nothing for 30 minutes and then the play ends. Thrilling gameplay.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

I don't really know about that I just heard it was talked about in this thread

 

[Ash]

Bullet hell arenas are apparently the only type of top-down shooter that exists ITT.

My recommendations:

Hotline Miami (one life) 7.5/10
Darkwood (survival horror - much shooting later in the game) 9/10
Psychon (an ancient indie classic) 7/10
Total Carnage (scrolling bullet hell) 7/10

I'm being strict and excluding isometric shooters because...arbitrary reasons and time.

Very curious about:

Subterrain. Anyone played it?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/340490/Subterrain/

 

[Machocruz]

Bullet hell arenas are apparently the only type of top-down shooter that exists ITT.

My recommendations:

Hotline Miami (one life) 7.5/10
Darkwood (survival horror - much shooting later in the game) 9/10
Psychon (an ancient indie classic) 7/10
Total Carnage (scrolling bullet hell) 7/10

I'm being strict and excluding isometric shooters because...arbitrary reasons and time.

Very curious about:

Subterrain. Anyone played it?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/340490/Subterrain/

Total Carnage is peak arcade shooting, not much better than it. Ultra-violence, guns, comedy, stereotypes, tits, everything a growing boy needs. Has aged like wine. I also liked Mercs and Shock Troopers.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

December 15th - $1.99 / €1.99 / £1.59

Vampire Survivors: Legacy Of The Moonspell contains:
8 never seen before characters
A Brand new stage. Our biggest yet, filled with several environments which also feature unique monsters
13 powerful new weapons with Evolutions for you to discover
6 brand new music tracks

The reason we're adding DLC's is so that we can theme them around certain settings, as you'll discover in Legacy of the Moonspell. It allows us to explore new settings and create some cohesion between the base game and the DLC's. DLC's will always be
purely extra content in terms of Stages, Monsters, Weapons, Characters etc.
Items, Power-ups, game mechanics and more will continue to be added to the base game, so if you don't pick up the DLC you don't have to fear missing out.

Only 1 Stage?
Yes!

Mt. Moonspell is 25 times bigger than other maps in Vampire Survivors, and that's a whole lot of map to explore! We wanted to add more exploration, reasons to head in every direction, and give you more ways to discover your new favorite XP spots, monster farms and places to hang out for 20 to 30 minutes.

 

[Gregz]

 

[Caim]

Expansion's out now. For me it's cheaper to buy the main game + expansion bundle because of the 20% bundle discount, so check that out.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/29537/Vampire_Survivors_Game__DLC_Bundle/

 

[luj1]

So is Vampire Survivors the best game of its kind?

 

[Caim]

So is Vampire Survivors the best game of its kind?

It was the first, so all others are compared to it. Might there be a better one? Might there be one that will end up better than VS? That remains to be seen, but it's possible.

 

[Acrux]

So is Vampire Survivors the best game of its kind?

There are a lot of clones out there now that do very different things, so it would depend on what you are looking for.

Also, you would hate VS as it is now. Shortly before the 1.0 release, the dev hired Jim Sterling as a writer, who started adding a bunch of woke tranny lore to the game (literally). As an arcade game, it didn't need any kind of a story.

 

[luj1]

Lokiamis Well?

 

[luj1]

Also, you would hate VS as it is now. Shortly before the 1.0 release, the dev hired Jim Sterling as a writer, who started adding a bunch of woke tranny lore to the game (literally).

The fuck man

Guess I'll have to find another VS-like out of principle

 

[Curratum]

Bought the DLC too, coming here to post specifically because it obviously triggers Jenkem a lot.

 

[Jenkem]

supporting tranny shit to own a stranger on the internet.

Powerful.

 

[Curratum]

I bought it because I play the game to the end of the content available, and will play it more now with the new content.

Just stopped by because I know your five brain cells squirm a lot when someone enjoys things you perceive as trans propaganda, which is literally everything.

 

[Haba]

I still haven't seen any of the tranny content in the game, as I am not a retard that reads lore entries for bats and flying skulls.

But the DLC looks kinda retarded TBH.

 

[Ranselknulf]

I'm going to give this game a try, seems interesting and its on sale right now.




Honorable mention from my wishlist that I just picked up. On sale for $0.99 right now.

 

[Black Angel]

So is Vampire Survivors the best game of its kind?

It was the first, so all others are compared to it. Might there be a better one? Might there be one that will end up better than VS? That remains to be seen, but it's possible.

The first was actually Magic Survival, but it's mobile-only atm (they do have plans to bring it on PC, but they probably preferred getting it to 1.0 first), so it's kinda moot point I guess.

Speaking of Magic Survival, the update before the last one brought highly desired change: the unique skills formerly removed during the earlier v0.8 patches, was back as Mastery. Not just that, they've confirmed that the fusion mechanic is making a comeback in the next v0.86 patch!....and then they killed the game (again) by removing Mastery, because they think the Mastery overlapped with the artifacts, as well as altering the Class system to be able to leveled up to level 4, but you need to spend some resources to buy the "XP" needed to level up those classes, but it is randomized in that you don't know which class are going to get those "XP" meaning the game is now FUCKING GACHA, and the resources can either be acquired by either spending real money, in large quantity by clearing an area/zone for the first time, or in small quantity by clearing or playing in endless mode any zone. And since the devs are galaxy-brained genius, it seems they've removed any kinds of rewards bonuses from playing the later stages.... Oh yeah, this is it, probably the last time I mentioned Magic Survival until the devs get their fucking shit together.

Now, thankfully, Vampire Survivors has released their mobile version, so the void is kinda filled. But it's just not the same, and out of severe desperation since I'm too attached to that game I mentioned above, I stumbled upon Pixel Mage Survival

Screenshots

Oh yeah, now this is the fucking shit I'm talking about, baby. Multiple, different layers of character progression, many many different classes with their own immediate quirks and weak spots, so many rooms for experimentation just from the classes and leveling system alone. The thing about this game is how "lethal" it is, in that you can easily die from not paying attention to a projectile flying your way; the game also emphasizes the most on "scaling", the enemy's stats will, naturally, increases exponentially as time goes on, and so you need to match the game's pace and scale your stats appropriately if you want to survive. Some people might not like it that way, but personally I think it's what sets the game apart. I often turns off the numbers showing on-screen because I'm used to that other certain game I've mentioned, but here even though there's no option to turn off the numbers, I'll be keeping the numbers up because it's just that important to know the overall progression. Also, there are no limit on how many artifacts you can carry at a time; the exact same artifacts can drop again and again, thus adding to its effect. This might seem like it made the choice of artifacts meaningless since you can just pick them all, but in practice this is crucial due to the aforementioned "lethal" and "scaling" nature of the game.
The game is still on 'early access' (and so there are no reviews atm), and that might be the reason for the current state of the game's monetization; there are no microtransaction for now (even though there are a LOT of stuff to buy from the main menu, and the costs gets progressively higher and higher), the only time mandatory ads would play is when you die, and sometimes the game will generate an opportunity for some free rewards, either in form of resources (that you can use to buy upgrades from main menu or the ones needed to upgrade your character in-game), artifacts, or free skill point, at the cost of watching ads, but these are entirely optional if you think you don't need the free rewards.
And, most importantly, the devs just keeps on adding things with each and new update, instead of deciding that no fun is allowed and remove stuff, like certain other devs.

 

[Axioms]

Wait why are people saying Vampire Survivors is original? This is just a common fantasy bullet hell type game. Realm of the Mad God is a more well known game that is very similar but there are less well known ones that are more exact matches. I'm sure I played half a dozen flash games with a similar concept also.

Are people just applying extremely specific filters when they claim the game is "the first"? Maybe it popularized it to younger people ala Minecraft vs Infiniminer?