Anyone else playing Vampire Survivors?

It's free to play on Itch.io (the good sort of free to play, no microtransactions) and extremely cheap on Steam ($3) and oddly compelling. 98% positive on Steam right now. My brother turned me on to it and it's just a good time-waster sort of game, though seems best suited for mobile, really. Early access right now, but getting very regular, meaningful weekly updates.

I've been putting time into it. So far, every time I think I'm tiring of it I turn another corner or it gets an update and it feels fresh again. Definitely worth a few bucks on Steam.

For three bucks, it's definitely been a fun time sink. That said, every time I run out of achievements and unlocks, it suddenly becomes a lot less interesting-- until the next update. Interested to see where it ends up.

With the last update, they said it's going to be longer between updates because they're moving it to a new engine or something? I'm interested to see how that changes it, if at all. It's a really fun thing to sit down with while you're listening to a podcast, trying different weapon combos to see what works. So far the only one I don't see a ton of use for is the whip, and the birds are maybe too time consuming to evolve for what their final form does.

FWIW the birds are maybe not necessary if you're doing the normal difficulty because you'll be killing stuff fine regardless (i.e. before the evolved bird can really get to enemies), but if you're playing in Hyper or using Curse the evolved bird really starts to shine. It does so much more damage than anything else when the enemies have larger health pools.

I'll have to try it with curse, last time I tried it, curse wasn't a thing yet. I also wish they'd make each power-up a slider once you've maxed it out, rather than the "just refund everything" method. Sometimes I just want a leisurely mass enemy stomp, other times I want more challenge. Maybe that'll come in a future update.

It's a great podcast/stream watching game, i'm still trying stuff out to see what works best and haven't got past 30 minutes yet.

Yeah. I've only played Hyper since I unlocked it, and I don't think I've ever had a run where I got the evolved birds where they weren't my highest DPS weapon. You just need to make sure you have another good weapon or two to bridge the gap while leveling the birds.

Same thing here. I bought it when Rorie did the QL and apparently have played over 33 hours. It's a really good podcast/side video game, but I find myself only playing it when the dev has added new stuff to do. By the time you've played enough and gotten enough persistent powerups, every run is a free win as long as you don't pick terrible items.

Anyone else checked in with the game after the recent update? I played a bit over the weekend after having not touched it since probably March and was really impressed with what they've added - lots of new characters and weapons, a bunch of new levels with different enemies, a card based arcana system, and a merchant that you can unlock so that he appears in all the levels and sells you items.

They haven't done anything to massively overhaul the basic mechanics of the game, but rather augment them, which seems the right choice considering how solid and fun that basic loop has been from the beginning.

The only change that feels like a negative to me is that they have over-corrected by making it so that all hidden items on each level have arrows pointing to them from the beginning. Whereas the previous approach of telling the player nothing was probably too obtuse, and the middle ground of giving you a map indicating where things are felt like the right balance, now it feels like you get way too much information. That might just be me and my preference for wandering around and stumbling on things rather than having a constant waypoint, though.

It's also included with PC GamePass.

Coming in hot from the officially unofficial Discord! Quite a few in there love the game, and I myself am constantly doing any new releases to keep my "platinum" on Steam. Such a good podcast game for a quick stint.

Yeah, they keep doing meaningful updates and it remains fun to play. Like a lot of people, I keep doing the new content as it comes out. Which turns out to be just the right amount of that game that I'm still not bored of it.

Though, heck, the new merchant actually somewhat caters to the true obsessives, because you can buy random permanent stat upgrades for characters. It's a small incentive to keep playing just for more gold to buy those perma-buffs, rather than just the achievements/unlocks. But that's way more hardcore than I want to be with this game.