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Earlier today, Blizzard put out a big messy patch for Diablo IV to get things ready for the impending launch of its first season. It took me all day to notice — because I was playing Vampire Survivors.
Both games center around action-based combat against monsters and stat-and item- based character progress. However, where Diablo IV offers up nothing but slow grinds and nightmare itemization, Vampire Survivors is pure gaming joy distilled into 30-minute play sessions. In spite of its simplicity, its core progression design is so thoughtful and well-balanced that it’s endlessly playable, over and over again.
Vampire Survivors popularized and largely defined the burgeoning genre of “auto shooting survival,” as some are calling it. I’m sure the name will solidify more in the coming years. There were others before it, but just as Wolfenstein and Doom codified the first-person shooter genre and Minecraft gave us voxel-based world building, Vampire Survivors is the gold standard to hit for games about moving around and auto-shooting hundreds of enemies with different unique attacks.
If you’ve ever played a dual joystick shooter like Smash TV or Geometry Wars, think that but much more laser focused. Vampire Survivors has only one control input for movement, and you can use anything…
