Vampire Hunters
Released: October 30th, 2024
Developer: GameCraft Studios
Publisher: GameCraft Studios
Systems: PC, PS5, Switch (reviewed), Xbox X/S
It would be very easy to write Vampire Hunters off as a desperate Vampire Survivors knockoff. I mean, it’s called Vampire Hunters for crying out loud! Store listings also directly namecheck Poncle’s game, just to compound the shamelessness. I initially wrote it off as a direct result of its sales pitch, because it’s a saturated market in which one can’t afford to make such poor first impressions.
When you’re competing for attention against games like Boneraiser Minions and Halls of Torment, you need to really stand out.
That said, the first-person conceit did at least invite my curiosity, and after hearing it was actually quite good I gave it a chance. I’m glad I did, because it turns out that Vampire Hunters is actually quite good!
A Survive ‘em Up by way of an FPS sounds like a great idea until you imagine how messy it could get. The 360 degree chaos that typifies a good Survivor game doesn’t immediately lend itself to a perspective where you only see what’s in front of you, yet Vampire Hunters nails it. Savvy visual design and old school shooter sensibilities have been brought together with impressive results.
In essence, it feels something like Serious Sam, which shares fundamental aspects with Vampire Survivors when you think about it. Serious Sam is about running from huge hordes of enemies while blanketing the screen in as much firepower as possible, and that’s exactly the formula Hunters capitalizes on.
Each map is fitted with multiple enemy spawn points and gives players twenty minutes of wave-based opposition before unlocking a completion task, such as closing said spawn points or collecting key items. Boss monsters appear at regular intervals, signaling difficulty increases that logically conclude with such a swollen population of enemies you can barely make anything out.
As you kill monsters and collect their souls, you’ll level up in a traditional roguelite fashion, choosing enhancements from randomized offerings of weapons, upgrades, and passive buffs. You can equip six primary guns, two secondary weapons, and two familiars, the lower sides of the screen progressively bristling with stacked weaponry as you tool up.
Vampire Hunters’ armory gleefully dances around the spectrum of mundanely practical to downright esoteric. Standard issue SMGs and shotguns are joined by fiery crossbows, garlic launchers, acid flowers, and guns that shoot literal pixies. You’ve got flamethrowers, icethrowers, light shooters, and a pirate cannon - y’know, in case the Serious Sam comparison wasn’t already apt enough.
Guns can be manually fired, but I will continue to argue manual attacks in Survivor games miss one of the genre’s most crucial points. Fortunately, it’s an optional setting, and the passive option works really well - as soon as an enemy is in your character’s crosshairs, they’ll start blasting. Each gun has its own separate ammo count and reload time, and I love how a slight recontextualization gives typical FPS mechanics the appearance of cooldown timers.
Automatic attacks make for a shooter with a distinct feel that’s damn satisfying when you’ve filled out your arsenal. Once the firepower is suitably hefty, you can sweep your reticule across the screen, mowing down monsters in a fashion that feels like painting them into nothingness. I guess I could’ve just said “erasing,” but that’s not as fancy.
Every weapon can be upgraded to not just improve stats but add a number of secondary traits. At level five, a gun’s behavior fully evolves - the acid flower creates spewing turrets on a kill, the flamethrower adds a fireball projectile to its output, etcetera. While new traits stop at level five, armaments can still be upgraded further for stat increases, though the returns at that point are diminishing.
Two secondary slots are reserved for less conventional implements that operate on more conventional cooldown timers. These may include melee-style weapons, powerful ordnance, or non-combat gear such as a shield generator. Secondary weapons are built far less equally than primary ones, in that some of them are ineffectual while others are deliciously overpowered. A stake with almost zero range is pure piss compared to the ridiculous DPS of the Living Chainsaw or Sun Beam.
Oh, and your weapon choices can be repeated, so if you’re lucky enough to get offered two of those chainsaws in one run, I recommend taking them. The results are sublime and they utterly carried me through the final map.
A pair of familiars round out your equipment, and they’ve the most diverse selection. The Lucky Cat offers random buffs every thirty seconds, while the Frog, Rat, and Meteor act like extra secondary weapons. My favorite is the Werewolf, a directly summoned creature that automatically slashes the shit out of things.
Once again, some Familiars are significantly worthless in comparison to others.
This wild disparity is sometimes the fault of the autofire feature - and yes, I’m aware I praised that option at the specific expense of manual attacks. While automatic fire works great for primary weapons, they undermine more situational equipment. Autofire triggers as soon as an enemy is in your sights, without regard to effectiveness or range.
What this means is that something like the Frog, which leaps a few feet in front to deal area poison damage, is rarely effective in passive mode because it doesn’t wait until there’s a worthwhile grouping of enemies. That melee stake attack I mentioned practically never hits since enemies won’t get anywhere near close enough when it activates.
Luckily, you can separate primary and secondary weapons in the settings menu. Have my regular attacks on automatic while activating secondaries at my discretion is a solid compromise that stops certain ones from being little more than wasted gear slots. Familiars are out of luck, though - they trigger of their own volition no matter what, which means I basically never pick the Frog despite loving frogs.
Oh, and nothing is saving the stake. It’s practically a joke weapon, and I’m yet to discover some punchline that makes it secretly deadly with the right setup. Also, there’s a literal Stake Gun in the primary weapon pool, what the fuck do you need just one little sharpened stick for?
Whatever the setting, there are still active commands in the form of skills and ultimate abilities (known here as Blood Abilities). The former is on a cooldown and the latter is charged up when killing enemies and taking damage, able to be used once the Blood Meter is full. By default, the Blood Ability is a devastating rapid fire mode, though individual characters can unlock their own unique one.
Vampire Hunters features six distinct characters with their own skills. The starting character, Sosuke, compliments his dodge skill with an instakill lunge ability, and Exagora the Paladin has an AoE stomp skill alongside a damaging/healing blood rain power. Each character feels distinct from one another thanks to their skills and the weapon preferences that promote certain playstyles.
You’ll pick up a number of different currencies during a run, each to be spent on permanent unlocks. Every character has a bespoke skill tree full of stat bonuses, skill upgrades, and equippable artifacts. There’s also a set of universal upgrades that apply their bonuses to every single character.
Despite this, and even with quite a few maps and guns to unlock, Vampire Hunters doesn’t ever feel like it has the density of progression that other games in the genre do. It may be the case that similar games have simply been spoiling their players, but the fact remains that after playing so many Survive ‘em Ups full of consistent toy deliveries, Hunters offers fewer treats that take longer to acquire. It definitely had an impact on my sense of long-term investment.
Fewer presents doesn’t mean an inherently frugal offering, and Vampire Hunters still has plenty going for it. Plus, y’know, it’s just fun regardless of whether or not you get something for playing.
Most stages are paced nicely, starting slow and eventually pouring torrents of enemies out from every hole. On the Switch, it’s not been uncommon to have the framerate go to immense shit during the final few minutes of a run, with the same ironically positive impact as Vampire Survivors.
Unlike the game that inspired this one, visual meltdowns are purely because of enemies rather than a torrent of special effects emanating from the player’s own attacks. Vampire Hunters is less about turning you into a walking bullet hell and draws its visual anarchy more from a growing army of abominations. That’s not to say you don’t become a ballistic sprinkler, but player output is refined and restrained when contrasted against other titles.
God damn though, the volume of enemies, made all the more voluminous thanks to their 3D nature, is truly staggering at times.
Despite so many threats coming in from every direction, I’ve rarely found myself unable to perceive them. A remarkably good job’s been done of appraising enemy placement - the indicators pinpointing offscreen danger are really clear, and enemies behind solid objects (including walls) are rendered in your choice of high contrast color. While there are still moments where I’ve felt blindsided, it’s nowhere near as common as one might think.
Hell, I’ve taken cheaper shots more frequently in games that put me up against a fraction of the enemies. For a game drenched in close quarters anarchy, Vampire Hunters has worked damn hard at visual communication. The only note I'd have is that spawning treasure chests can be easily missed until they're close to despawning and start to flash. For an ADHD sufferer especially, a flash or two at the time of spawning would be immensely useful especially since chests don't hang around long.
You level up at a decent clip during each session, with a wide range of passives appearing in the reward pool alongside guns. One thing that’s worth noting is that no matter what “build” you may go for, the dependable appearance of certain rewards encourages a level of repetition. You’ll almost always get offered items that increase DPS in relation to how many of your weapons deal burning damage, as well as ones that explicitly improve said weapons.
Basically, killing it with fire remains as effective a method of engaging the vampirically inclined as it always has.
Boss encounters showcase some of Vampire Hunters’ most creative ideas. While there’s a bunch of typically aggressive monstrosities who simply attack you, others are less direct or sometimes not even truly hostile. There are a few summoners, a wizard that casts AoE spells indiscriminately, and an impish fuck who lays down totems to buff the enemies. Some are huge arena monsters that don’t enter the map but appear from outside its confines, either hurling fire or pumping in super tanky creatures.
Two bosses deserve special mention: Kappa Egg spawns with a half-full but regenerating health bar and tries to avoid you until it hits 100% HP, at which point it hatches into the dangerous King Kappa. Slayme is a big Muk-looking wanker whose sole function is to trail slowing slime as it moves, but it’s a high priority target because that slime never goes away and gets spread alarmingly wide if left unchecked.
Dashes of creativity like this are dotted around the entire production. Among the weapons, upgrades, skills, and stage designs are all manner of clever little twists. After my first hour of playing Vampire Hunters, it became obvious just how much effort had gone into making more than just a gimmicky FPS with a trend to chase.
Graphically, Hunters is… something. I hesitate to liken its visuals to the PSX style, as the harsh polygons are so smeared and lumpy. Anything with a face is quasi- eyeless, like a shop dummy, and the whole aesthetic makes me think of dirty Vaseline for reasons I cant explain. I sort of hate how it looks, and yet it also looks perfect for what it is.
The UI is a hassle on consoles, clearly designed for PC with no controller optimization and poor readability on TV screens. The layout is a scattered hassle to scroll through, the process of which is twitchy and sometimes unintuitive. Presentation of the interface in general isn’t particularly pretty. Characters also resort to their starting weapons and unequip any artifacts you give them whenever you swap them out. This is a particularly silly oversight.
There’s a real nice soundtrack, that much I can tell you. I wish there was more of it, and it’d be nice if stages had some of their own specific tracks, but the music on offer is catchy as hell, and that’s before we get to the spectacle that is the credit sequence. I won’t spoil it, but it’s a dumb delight.
Marketing isn’t the only area in which Vampire Hunters demonstrates abject shamelessness. Its sense of humor is bold-faced, to say the least, often bypassing referential and jumping straight to literally having a boss be Duane “The Rock” Johnson in his Scorpion King guise. There’s not an ounce of subtlety in the entire game, and I don’t mind that, if I’m honest.
Still, some of the jokes are so roundabout as to be borderline abstract. I’d say the bestiary could use a going over and a fresh translation, but then again, I’m a bit too biased to judge that particular area.
“Vampire Survivors but it’s an FPS” is a solid idea with so much potential to wind up as an ill-advised mess. Vampire Hunters does the concept justice with a thoughtfully produced game that not only serves Survive ‘em Up gameplay in a fresh format but pops a ton of clever little touches on top. Despite its name sounding like that of a videogame mockbuster, this is the kind of fresh flavor any overly saturated genre sorely needs.
8/10
