Part 1 (Sep 2023) · #6 of 18 in that tierWatch the moment (2:58:02)
Mow down thousands of night creatures and survive until dawn! Vampire Survivors is a gothic horror casual game with rogue-lite elements, where your choices can allow you to quickly snowball against the hundreds of monsters that get thrown at you. Be the bullet hell!
Consensus
A78.7/100
Steam players98.3% positiveOverwhelmingly Positive266,089 reviews
Metacritic ↗86/100Users: 8.1/10
VG Insights estimate ↗≈8M copies · ≈$24.2M gross
What creators say
Ranked Apr 2022 · #5 of 5 in that tierWatch the moment (0:21:37)
Ranked Aug 2024 · #7 of 7 in that tierWatch the moment (0:53:42)
Ranked Jun 2024 · #6 of 9 in that tierListen to the episode
Scored 8.56/10 · tier derived from the score
Ranked Jun 2023 · #5 of 17 in that tierWatch the moment (0:47:25)
Ranked Apr 2023 · #5 of 16 in that tierWatch the moment (2:03:54)
Ranked May 2026 · #1 of 2 in that tierWatch the moment (0:13:45)
Ranked Sep 2026 · #4 of 10 in that tierListen to the episode
Ranked Apr 2025 · #6 of 8 in that tierWatch the moment (1:12:09)
Ranked Apr 2023 · #1 of 16 in that tierWatch the moment (0:51:17)
What players say
A minimalist auto-attacking 'bullet heaven' roguelite by Poncle where you move around a screen while weapons fire themselves, collecting XP to build an absurdly overpowered loadout and survive 15-30 minutes against swarms of monsters.
Near-universally praised as a cheap, endlessly moreish dopamine loop that essentially founded the 'bullet heaven' / survivors-like subgenre. Steam shows 98.3% positive (Overwhelmingly Positive, roughly 266k reviews) and Metacritic PC critics give it 86 with a 8.1 user score. It launched into Steam early access in Dec 2021, blew up via streamers/YouTube in early 2022, hit 1.0 in Oct 2022, and has since been ported to Xbox, mobile, Switch, PlayStation and Quest with a steady stream of free updates and paid collab DLC (Castlevania, Among Us, Contra, Balatro, etc.). It is actively supported, not abandoned. The small negative minority calls it shallow, mindless, too easy once powered up, and a time sink; some long-term fans are tired of the DLC cadence or breaking patches.
Players love
- Extremely addictive 'one more run' loop: escalating power fantasy where a few minutes of play turns you into a screen-clearing god
- Price and value: around $5 on Steam with hundreds of hours of content, frequently described as among the best-value games available
- Huge roster of characters, weapons, evolutions, stages and secrets that reward experimentation and discovery
- Low barrier to entry: one-stick control, auto-attacks, and runs simple enough to play with minimal attention yet deep enough for theorycrafting
- Developer care: free wiki, cross-saves, online co-op and regular free content updates, earning a Steam 'Labor of Love' nomination per a reviewer
- Performs well on low-end hardware, Steam Deck and phones; critics singled out Steam Deck suitability
- Strong co-op appeal, including couch co-op on Switch and online co-op on PC
- Nostalgic, Castlevania-style gothic pixel aesthetic and lots of fan service and references
Common complaints
- Gameplay is minimal: many players say you reach a point in each run where you no longer need to dodge and can effectively idle
- Difficulty swings between trivial and overwhelming; some say it gets easier as it goes, with little real challenge once builds snowball
- Screen fills with effects and clutter late in runs, making it hard to read what is happening
- Many characters and items feel like stat-tweaked copies of each other; run variety is perceived as lower than the roster suggests
- Progression and unlock conditions are opaque; reviewers complain they cannot tell which character or stage is needed next without a wiki
- Stability complaints after some patches: crashes around the 10-minute mark and level-up soft-locks in multiplayer were reported in Steam reviews
- Audio is repetitive, with complaints about a single looping track and one critic calling the soundtrack weak
- Simple enemy and boss design: mostly slow melee mobs and bosses that feel like larger normal enemies
Can feel tedious
- 100%-ing is described as monotonous and grindy once you know all the mechanics; there is always something left to unlock
- Runs are long (up to 30 minutes), so it is poorly suited to short sessions; chest and level-select pauses extend the timer and this must be toggled per run according to one reviewer
- Some players say they just walk in circles collecting gems for 20 minutes
- Unlock chasing can require playing specific characters or stages in opaque ways, which reviewers found frustrating
- Players who feel it is 'slot machine' or clicker-like dislike the luck-driven level-up choices and passive play
- Some long-time fans say the flood of DLC feels like it should be a sequel with fixes instead
What's unique
- Helped define the 'bullet heaven' genre: automatic combat where the only control is movement, inverting bullet hell
- Runs are built around a soft 30-minute timer and a Reaper that eventually ends unwinnable runs
- Weapon evolution recipes (specific weapon plus passive combos) create a discovery-driven build layer
- Persistent meta-progression via gold-bought PowerUps plus a huge web of secret unlocks
- Made by essentially one developer in Phaser, originally inspired by Magic Survival, and grew into a multi-platform franchise with licensed collabs, a spinoff (Vampire Crawlers)
- Sold at a very low price point but sustained by paid DLC that adds large new content sets
Players want
- Clearer in-game guidance for unlock requirements so players do not need the wiki
- Better difficulty scaling so late-run and endgame builds stay engaging instead of trivializing content
- More enemy and boss variety, including ranged or pattern-based threats that force movement decisions
- Quality-of-life options: skippable or disabled level-up animations, random-character select, less awkward level-up screens that drop you facing the wrong way
- More balanced co-op, including restoring item slot counts that one player said were cut in a patch without notes
- Fewer patch-introduced bugs and better communication of balance changes in patch notes
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
Action RoguelikeBullet HellPixel GraphicsRogue-liteVampire2DIndieSingleplayerCasualArcade
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Tier list Part 1 (2023)
Vampire Survivors is a single-level-layout, top-down, hack-and-slash style roguelite with lots of things to upgrade, where the only input is movement. He says it looks basic at first glance but hides a huge amount of depth, with new levels, characters, builds and secrets to discover. He calls it very satisfying and engaging rather than a game of perfect balance or strategy. He puts it in A tier, explicitly not S, and is slightly annoyed that it encouraged a wave of predatory app-style games.
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