Vampire Hunters is what happens when you take Vampire Survivors and turn it into a first-person-shooter. The whole formula of killing thousands of enemies to collect XP which you then spend to buy tons of different weapons and power ups until you're filling the screen with ridiculous attacks is present and accounted for and works just as well here. Being a FPS it does present it's own quirks - obviously, enemies can sneak up from behind since you can't see them - but it all works well once you get into the swing of how to play. You can manually shoot or let the game automatically handle everything, which is recommended because things can get pretty darn hectic deep into a run.
We played on Xbox but it is available on all systems and PC.
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The gameplay loop is a little different from a normal bullet heaven game because your best bet for survival is to find choke points and just camp out rather than running around too much. You only really have to move when treasure boxes appear around the level you might want to pick up. Or when bosses spawn in and you need to take care of them before the whole level becomes a mess.
It can be a little repetitive, I have to say. The weapons and items aren't as interesting as Vampire Survivors and some of its better clones. The first level also kinda sucks and makes a pretty awful first impression, but once you beat it and move on the other levels are a lot more dynamic and interesting. The game is also pretty difficult at first, but once you level up and can make a build you actually like it's a lot better to play.
One complaint I have is that beating a level takes 30-minutes, which is just way way way too damn long. There is an unlockable modifier that makes the clock run at 2x speed, but if you do that it makes some levels almost impossible to beat because bosses spawn in so fast you don't have enough time to clear them out and you can't level up at a fast enough rate to keep up with the hordes of enemies. It's still fun, and you learn how to deal with it, but some rebalancing of the difficulty would do wonders here.
I said that Vampire Hunters is really two games in one. Originally, Vampire Hunters was a simpler game where you just walked forward down a corridor killing everything that spawned in front of you while unlocking tons of new weapons and upgrades along the way. That mode is also included here along with the more open sandbox levels in the survival mode. The two modes play pretty differently and have separate progression systems, so you can spend a lot of time playing each of them. I prefer the open survivor mode over the classic corridor mode, but I'm glad they're both here.
All in all, Vampire Hunters is pretty darn solid. It's a great value offering tons of gameplay for $15 and is a fun fresh take on the wave survival bullet heaven Vampire Survivors like - whatever you want to call it - genre. It's difficult, and takes a bit of grinding to really dig into it, but once you do it's addictive and fun. I've had a blast with it.
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