Several developers are currently working on the next evolution of Vampire Survivors-style auto shooters, aiming to refined, expand, and put their own stamp on the genre. The creators of Vampire Hunters are arguably ahead of the curve, presenting the world with a first-person roguelike auto-shooter in which our hero carries numerous weapons at once, populating the top and bottom of the screen. This isn’t as distracting as you may expect, and there’s even a gauge to edge weapons out of view entirely – one of many thoughtful touches present.
It plays how you’d expect, pretty much. The starting stage is a small multifloored mansion with a courtyard, and you begin with a single firearm – with a gradually expanding selection available – to fight off hordes of creatures that emerge from spiked coffins dotted around the arena. They drop blue XP tokens, allowing you to level up and acquire a new weapon, familiar, trinket, contract or an upgrade. Weapons – which of which there are many, varying from shotguns to sci-fi style lasers and lightsabres – have different damage ratios, ranges, and reload times. This means you’ll need to grab a balanced assortment to keep spewing bullets at a fast enough rate to deal with the constant swarm of enemies. They’re a little mindless and zombie-like, forever shuffling towards your location, but great in number.
Keeping alive for as long as possible is the goal here, with random bosses appearing periodically that can be problematic – especially if you’re trapped in a smaller area and surrounded by creatures or low on health, with the means to restore HP being few. The bosses themselves are just as varied as the weapon selection, including clusters of wasp hives spread across a map, a dragon that dwarfs battlements, and a sandworm that fills the central courtyard.
When a run ends, you’re given the option to continue or return to the menu. The text-heavy menu screen is initially a bit tricky to navigate, filled with multiple tabs and options along with online leaderboards for each stage. There’s a choice of characters each with their own skill tree and an unlockable ‘ultimate’ that’s on a cooldown, various permanent upgrades to increase reload speed, damage, health, and XP token collection ranges. You can also choose ‘constellations’ that make things harder in exchange for a score multiplier or similar, and equip relics that give minor perks. All of these things will help you stay alive longer, with the biggest focus of all being on beating stages 100% to unlock the next stage. These are quite varied too, with their own enemy rosters and themes, including an Egyptian pyramid and a medieval village.
Vampire Hunters is, for the most part, very enjoyable. The randomised music selection is surprisingly upbeat, and the low poly PS1-style visuals are appealing. It doesn’t take itself too seriously either, which is always pleasing, and the focus during combat is always on becoming overpowered, which it excels at. It isn’t long into a run that you’ll be simultaneously auto-firing miniguns, swinging swords, spewing flames, and even summoning meteors onto the battlefield, killing several enemies at once. There’s an onus on moving around the arenas too and not just remaining in one area. Not just because some locations can become quickly flooded with enemies, but because treasure chests appear at random locations. Larger enemies can also force you to backtrack to a safer zone, while a new boss encounter may catch you off guard.
Handily, enemies are outlined with silhouettes, showing their locations even if they’re halfway across the map. There’s an on-screen radar too, assisting in watching your back.
There are a couple of things worth addressing though. The first is the health situation. It’s possible to extend the health bar significantly by investing in upgrades, but if you aren’t doled out a ‘life steal’ or regeneration ability, you’re forced to rely on the scant few health drops that appear at statues randomly. During most runs, I was never able to recover a great deal of health, hoping instead for a resurrection spell. It’s very easy to lose a chunk of health just by strafing around bosses or while trying to exit heavily crowded rooms, and this can be frustrating. At the same time though, most stages have a ‘safe zone’ of sorts where you can camp once a full roster of upgraded weapons has been gained. Finding these locations can call for experimentation, making it part of the experience. I guess the developers had to include some sort of safety net to ensure eventual victories, as their inclusion feels like it was necessitated.
Vampire Hunters is definitely designed for the long haul, intended to be played extensively, gradually improving your chosen character with each and every run. The achievements here are challenging to unlock, with a handful linked to reaching level 50 with each hero. It’s very easy to become invested in, even if the goal of unlocking every stage isn’t a huge motivator; there isn’t much here in the way of a storyline. What it does include however is a completely separate bonus game. The original Vampire Hunters takes the form of a Classic Mode. It’s a simplified experience based around running ‘n gunning through looping corridors, using gold to purchase weapons instead of being able to select one at will. Quite a few achievements are linked to this mode, so you’ll need to invest time here too. It turns out that having two games to swap between makes for a nice diversion, should one or the other start to fatigue.
A decent mixture of old skool, no fuss, shooting sensibilities, next-gen tech, and a well gauged difficulty level – itself reliant on the game’s balanced pool of upgrades – makes Vampire Hunters a very easy recommendation, feeling like a genuine step forward in the auto-shooting roguelike genre. If you’ve spent hours playing Vampire Survivors, you can doubtlessly expect this to sap away your spare time in a similar manner too, with only a bit of surplus bloat holding it back from achieving greatness. Something to unify its various upgrade trees may have been beneficial as well, but there still a lot to sink your teeth into regardless.
Gamecraft Studio’s Vampire Hunters is out 30th October on all formats.