No, you didn’t misread the title. Vampire Hunters is quite literally an FPS roguelike that works exactly how you’d expect it to just by looking at the name, and it’s hilariously easy to lose hours of your time just blasting through monsters. I’ve played over 10 hours of it recently and here are my thoughts on the game after unlocking all of the stages.
Full disclosure: I received a review copy from the developer after the game got a massive content update.
Point & Shoot
At its core, the game is a standard “Survivors-like”, but in 3D. Just like in Vampire Survivors, you spend around 30 minutes running around and fending off an endless horde of monsters until the game triggers the final objective of each map.
There’s a wide range of guns to use, and no, it isn’t a standard shooter. You can carry up to ten primary weapons, along with a few more secondary ones. The catch? All of them shoot at the same time, so you don’t really switch them around.
You fire automatically by default, which is fair because you have an unlimited amount of ammo and a ton of enemies to shoot. It’s essentially a bullet heaven in FPS form. You still have to aim anyway, since headshots deal bonus damage.
With certain weapons or a ricochet build, manually shooting even while you’re technically out of range can make sense at times too. While writing this, I just completed a run where I bounced cannonballs from afar. As I mentioned in my Heretic’s Fork review, I do like making builds that turn games into incomprehensible messes of particle effects, and that’s easily achievable as seen here:
Upgrades & Meta-Progression
As you’d expect, you can upgrade your guns to unlock varying effects and more damage as you level up through a run. There are also a lot of relics that give you varying passive effects, including those that add new damage types to your weapons or help you tank through mistakes and unavoidable damage.
Aside from that, you can gain a lot of power through the game’s meta-progression systems. Using the various currencies that you earn from playing the game, you can upgrade your global base stats or each character’s skill tree, the latter of which can unlock artifacts that you can equip to gain an even more powerful initial boost.
If you’re a fan of the genre, these aren’t going to be new to you, and it’s substantial enough that you’ll definitely find a reason to keep grinding.
Optional Modifiers
Vampire Hunters features a “Constellations” mechanic, in which you can unlock varying modifiers by playing through the game and completing certain challenges. These are optional modifiers that make the game either easier or harder, and you can equip multiple at a time.
I’m pretty sure most people only really use these if they care about the leaderboard, because some of them can boost your score. They’re also there for anyone who just kinda want to do some self-imposed challenges, so if you wanna flip the screen upside down or play an endless mode, then the game has you covered.
Is It Worth Getting?
Despite the varying levels, the game might feel way too repetitive at times because of the lack of unique bosses per map. For the most part, you’ll encounter the exact same bosses every few minutes no matter what level you’re playing in, and sometimes they’ll even spawn the same ones more than once per run.
It makes up for it with the varying regular and elite enemies, though a lot of them really only walk towards you and nothing else. Regardless, it’s still a blast to play if you enjoy these types of roguelikes, because the way you’ll be moving around makes it feel like a good ol’ boomer shooter with enemy density pumped up to ludicrously high levels.
If you’re a completionist, you’ll get a lot of hours out of the game just by virtue of it having over 200 achievements to collect. Luckily, a lot of them do require you to play a certain way, so you’re forced into adapting various builds or playstyles if you wanna 100% the game. That should at least keep things fresh for a while.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Battlefield 6 is coming out in a matter of minutes, so I’ll catch you guys later…