You know my favourite thing about Vampire Survivors? The slow build of strength, the swelling power fantasy, the edging.
Developer Poncle has proved itself incredibly adept at goading players into ever more ludicrous setups, demonstrating that with some patience, a canny eye for build-crafting, and some very rudimentary knowledge of your surroundings, even an old man armed with garlic can be an extinction level event for the amassing undead. Warhammer Survivors sadly never reaches those heights.
Created by Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 studio Auroch Digital, Warhammer Survivors is - as its name suggests - an officially-licensed attempt to transplant developer Poncle's winning Vampire Survivors' formula to the Warhammer universe.
Cue 40+ characters ripped from Warhammer lore getting the action-roguelike treatment, crossbows instead of clock lancets, rocket launchers instead of fire wands, bomb Squids instead of skeletons… you get the idea.
But this fusion doesn't really work. While Vampire Survivors was always a bit of an uphill battle from the start, it still hooked you with a thread that pulled you forward, tempting you with power-ups and other intriguing toys to play with en route. If hour one was a slog, hour five sparked curiosity, and hour 10 was a romp. In Warhammer Survivors, however, hour 10 feels like just as much of a slog as hour one.
And even though Warhammer Survivors offers two alternate universes - the grimdark future of 40K and the old-school fantasy of Age of Sigmar, each a full game in its own right - this does little to alleviate the grind.
It's all so slow. Characters move slowly, upgrades come slowly, unlocking the mode that makes things move a bit faster comes slowly. Every inch feels like a mile, and the moreish power creep - tantalisingly propulsive in Vampire Survivors - is out of reach for so long per run here, it's discouraging. That's not to say there isn't any resolution to all the tension.
Every now and then, you'll roll the right dice, appease the right gods, make the right moves. Your miniature pixel heroes will overcome the odds, and burn through the writhing mass of Orks, Skaven, Tyranids, Nurgle, or whatever other bastards are trying to get you down today.
The Survivors genre - sometimes known as 'bullet heaven' now - lives and dies on the strength of the over-powered nonsense that emerges as all your weapons and evolutions start to harmonise with each other in brutal synchronicity. Warhammer Survivors seems reluctant to let you get to this level, though.
Even 30 hours in (!), some runs will end before they ever really get started - no matter how many skips, rerolls, or other chance-altering upgrades you've committed to your save file.
And because this is really two games glued into one, you have to do all the requisite grinding and levelling on both sides. With massive maps and impossibly slow character movement (especially on some of the bulkier characters), collecting all the items per location is more of a chore than it is fun.
This wouldn't be so bad if these items were just curios, but in most cases they're pretty significant quality-of-life enhancers. Why are you hiding them from me, Auroch!?
It's almost impressive how Warhammer Survivors manages to feel like a step back from Poncle's original in many ways: yes, there's more content, but there appears to be a lack of understanding of why this genre immediately took off and spawned a myriad of imitators. The very worst weapons are the only…
