We need to set out our terms. Vampire Survivors is such a recent phenomenon that a genre name for it, and the many games appearing in its wake, has yet to be agreed upon. In fact, a lot of recent clones attempt to dress things up in ambiguous terms to pretend away the comparisons, saying things like âreverse bullet hellâ and âsurvival game with rogue-like elements,â despite the games all obviously having much more in common with twin-stick shooters.
But these are distinct from those, too, by the specific nature of firing being entirely automated. Thatâs the key differential here: these are games in which new abilities are stacked, each running on their own timers, firing off automatically. Thatâs the criteria for inclusion here, certainly. (And yes, perhaps controversially, that means I wonât be including the fantastic 20 Minutes Till Dawn.) We have to be specific, or at a certain point this becomes a piece about Robotron-likes.
So letâs help things along by nailing it down. A lot of people are referring to âhordeâ games which is a good start, and given âautomaticâ is so essential, why donât we agree on âAutomatic Horde Shootersâ? Thatâs clever enough, because it leaves room for people to far more interestingly innovate on the form with ideas Iâve yet to see, like say a first-person Automatic Horde Shooter. Or turn-based Automatic Horde Shooter.
Another peculiarity of the genre is price. Theyâre all incredibly, unnecessarily cheap. VS set a weird standard by pricing itself at just three bucks, and so many others have, presumably, felt obliged to follow suit. So you can pretty much pick up everything in this list for half the price of one regular game.
So, with a hefty acknowledgement that Vampire Survivors wasnât the first game to deliver these ingredients, and indeed you could quite reasonably trace its origins back to 1982âs Robotron: 2084, letâs take a look at a selection of games to grab when youâve finally tired of VS.
