De Tom Plays
Vampire Survivors review artwork
De Tom Plays Review

Vampire Survivors

🧛 Hundreds of hours later, Vampire Survivors remains one of my first loves. Simple to play, packed with things to discover and dangerously good at turning one more run into several.

Gaming
✍️ Written by: Tom 📅 Posted on 3 Sep 2026
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About The Game

🧛 Vampire Survivors is a small indie game that you've probably never heard of... unless you've been anywhere near gaming during the last few years, in which case there's a reasonable chance you've already lost several hundred hours of your life to it. The premise is wonderfully simple: move your character around, survive increasingly ridiculous hordes of enemies and let your weapons handle the attacking automatically.

⚔️ Each run starts relatively quietly, with a character and their starting weapon facing comparatively manageable groups of enemies. Defeating them drops experience gems, levelling you up and allowing you to choose new weapons and passive abilities or improve those you already have. Before long, those manageable groups have become enormous swarms filling practically every available pixel of the screen.

✨ Beneath those wonderfully simple controls sits a surprisingly deep system of weapons, passive items and evolutions. Learning which items work together allows weapons to evolve into considerably more powerful forms, and discovering those combinations is a huge part of the fun. A run can begin with you cautiously avoiding a handful of enemies and end with your character resembling a mobile natural disaster while thousands of things disappear around you.

🔓 The progression continues well beyond individual runs. New characters, stages, weapons, upgrades, secrets and other surprises gradually become available, giving you a seemingly endless collection of reasons to say, "I'll just have one more go." Permanent upgrades make subsequent attempts stronger too, so even an unsuccessful run can contribute towards making future ones that little bit easier.

🎮 It's incredibly accessible on the surface — movement is essentially all you need to worry about during normal play — yet there is an enormous amount underneath for anyone who wants to dig deeper. That combination of simplicity, discovery, progression and increasingly absurd levels of on-screen destruction is a large part of why Vampire Survivors became such an influential indie success, and why I've personally been able to lose hundreds upon hundreds of hours to it.

My final thoughts

Tom's Verdict

💜 Tom Recommends

💜 Tom Recommends

Vampire Survivors is one of my gaming first loves within this style of game. I've played newer games that are prettier, more complicated and considerably more ambitious, but there is something about Vampire Survivors that keeps pulling me back. I've already put hundreds upon hundreds of hours into the Xbox version, completed every achievement, finished every mission and unlocked everything I could find. Apparently that wasn't enough, because I've now started all over again on PC.

🧛 Starting from scratch has actually reminded me just how well the progression works. On Xbox I'd become accustomed to having characters, upgrades and ridiculous combinations available to me, whereas my first few PC runs suddenly left me feeling rather vulnerable again. A little grinding, a few permanent upgrades and some fresh unlocks later, and that familiar feeling of becoming progressively more powerful started returning.

⚔️ That's where Vampire Survivors has always excelled for me. Your direct involvement is incredibly simple — mostly movement and positioning — but the decisions surrounding your build can completely transform a run. Finding weapons, combining them with the right passive items and eventually evolving them can take you from desperately weaving between enemies to becoming an almost unstoppable force of destruction. Few games make that transformation quite as satisfying.

✨ And somehow, despite knowing the game extremely well, starting again has given me things to rediscover. I'd forgotten some early weapon combinations and little pieces of progression simply because it had been so long since I'd needed to think about them. That says something about just how much Vampire Survivors eventually gives you to unlock, learn and experiment with.

🎮 There are now countless games inspired by this formula, and some have taken individual parts of it considerably further. But Vampire Survivors doesn't need to compete by becoming more complicated. Its greatest strength is arguably how effortlessly everything fits together. It's easy to understand, incredibly difficult to put down and deep enough that hundreds of hours later I can still happily sit down for another run.

💜 Starting again from nothing when I already had a completely developed save elsewhere should probably have felt like a chore. Instead, I've found myself enjoying the journey all over again. There aren't many games I would willingly reset hundreds of hours of progress to experience from the beginning, but Vampire Survivors is absolutely one of them.

For me, Vampire Survivors earns a 💜 Tom Recommends.

Game Screenshots

Vampire Survivors Screenshot 1 Vampire Survivors Screenshot 2 Vampire Survivors Screenshot 3

Watch My Gameplay

Prefer to see Vampire Survivors in action? Watch my gameplay video to see how the game plays before reading my full verdict.

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The positives

Why I Liked This Game

  • ✅ 🧛 Wonderfully Simple To Play - Movement and positioning do most of the work, making Vampire Survivors incredibly easy to pick up while leaving plenty of depth beneath those simple controls.
  • ✅ ⚔️ Fantastic Weapon Evolutions - Finding the right weapon and passive combinations before evolving them into something considerably more destructive remains one of my favourite parts of the game.
  • ✅ 💥 Becoming Ridiculously Powerful - Few things are quite as satisfying as starting a run feeling vulnerable and eventually becoming a walking natural disaster capable of clearing enormous hordes from the screen.
  • ✅ 🔓 An Extraordinary Amount To Unlock - Characters, weapons, stages, permanent upgrades, secrets and achievements provide an enormous amount to discover and plenty of reasons to keep coming back.
  • ✅ 📈 Progress Always Feels Meaningful - Even when a run doesn't go particularly well, you're usually earning something that contributes towards future attempts and gradually makes you stronger.
  • ✅ 🧪 So Much Room For Experimentation - Different characters, weapons and combinations give you plenty of opportunities to try new builds rather than simply repeating the same strategy every time.
  • ✅ 🔁 Dangerously Replayable - The famous "one more run" problem is very real. Even after hundreds upon hundreds of hours on Xbox, I've willingly started from scratch on PC and become hooked all over again.
  • ✅ 💜 Still One Of My Favourites - Many games have expanded upon the formula since, but Vampire Survivors remains one of my first loves in the genre and one I can happily keep returning to.
Things to consider

What I Didn't Like In This Game

  • ❌ 🤷 Nothing I Can Honestly Call A Dislike - There are elements that won't appeal to everyone. The pixel graphics are deliberately simple, the screen can become complete chaos and the basic controls may initially make the game appear shallower than it really is. But none of those are negatives for me. - After hundreds upon hundreds of hours, completing everything on Xbox and then voluntarily starting again on PC, pretending I have a genuine dislike simply to fill this box would be rather dishones
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