Beyond Vampire Survivors: more games where you kill hundreds of the same enemy

[Mogri]

My personal name for this genre is  semi-autobattlers. There's no hard and fast rule for what qualifies a game for this list, but here's a few things they have in common:

• You control one character or group against hordes of enemies.
• Coming into contact with an enemy is quickly but not instantly fatal.
• You control movement, but your attacks are often automatic.
• These games tend to be absurdly inexpensive: almost always under $5.

SNKRX is one of the grand-daddies of the genre, and it's still one of the best. Picture the snake game put into a blender with auto chess, and you've got a good idea of what to expect. Development has finished on this game, and the developer has open-sourced the game. There's a big content mod out there that I think ruins the game, but it's probably worth a try if you've squeezed everything you can out of the game.

Vampire Survivors came out about half a year later. There's a thread dedicated to it. I think VS ultimately has a little less interaction than I prefer, but I certainly sunk some good time into it.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is a slightly contentious entry here, since you do have to attack manually, but it's a clear successor in spirit to VS, requiring you to kill enemies to gain experience to gain levels to get new toys to kill more enemies. As the name suggests, a successful run takes 33% less time than in VS. There's less content in this game than the very robust VS, but it's still receiving content updates.

Just King hews much closer to the SNKRX model, including stage-based progress and classes with synergies. A full run of this game depends on how quickly you kill things, but I want to say it's something like 15 minutes. It's still receiving content updates, but I highly recommend what's there already.

Brotato exists only in demo form at the moment, but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what separates it from being a finished game. Kill enemies to get currency and experience. Gain mutations as you level up, gain items and weapons between stages. Survive 12 stages to win. It's relatively straightforward, but there's a good amount of variety even with just the character classes available, and it's also free.

Boneraiser Minions is my newest acquisition. You're a necromancer who raises a skeletal army to defend you against a variety of enemies. Success in this game depends more heavily on meta progression than I prefer, but it doesn't take long to max everything. I don't think this game has as much staying power as some of the others I've listed, but it's like two bucks, and they also stuck a Triple Triad knockoff in it for some reason.

Please recommend me more of these games!

 

[Peklo]

HoloCure! Read the thread for what I think of it, but it's a tremendous show of craft for this genre and a love letter to the fandom it's part of. Completely free because Kay Yu doesn't want to monetize it, and right now it's on the cusp of its first significant content update due out sometime in September, which from the looks of it will blow out the amount of extant material with a new stage, music, enemies, and a huge number of new characters to play as. I'm excited to get back to it, as the fundamentals are just that compelling that the lone debut stage sustained playtime for quite a while when the game released a mere two months ago.

 

[muteKi]

I remember a decade ago people playing a Touhou game that looked nearly identical to Vampire Survivor but I cannot for the life of me remember what the title was.

 

[YangusKhan]

20 Minutes Till Dawn is a slightly contentious entry here, since you do have to attack manually, but it's a clear successor in spirit to VS, requiring you to kill enemies to gain experience to gain levels to get new toys to kill more enemies. As the name suggests, a successful run takes 33% less time than in VS. There's less content in this game than the very robust VS, but it's still receiving content updates.

What are the specifics for this game's controls? I'd be playing it on the Steam Deck, but I'm pretty wary of having to manually aim for games in this genre.

Nomad Survival is a more pared-down approach to VS. Stages are not infinite scrolling voids, rather they do have some actual structure; there is a much higher emphasis placed on build synergy, and even then, effective builds won't be causing screen-wide absolute mayhem like in VS. There are boss fights throughout the 30 minute time, and there is a final boss on each map you have to fight.

I can also list the games that are on my wishlist. Boneraiser Minions is already one of them, so...

Soulstone Survivors - This thing has a demo that seems to be updated regularly as opposed to being in Early Access. It also has a companion game from the same devs where they're using the exact same engine to instead build a 3rd-person action roguelike? Anyway I haven't played it yet.

Spirit Hunters - This was in a Kotaku article I read recently about this genre. That's pretty much all I can say about it. I liked the art style which is why I wishlisted it.

Necrosmith - Might not fit exactly in this genre because the units you're building are not controlled manually. So maybe more like an actual RTS or Tower Defense game?

 

[Mogri]

What are the specifics for this game's controls? I'd be playing it on the Steam Deck, but I'm pretty wary of having to manually aim for games in this genre.

I've tried it on Deck. It's certainly not as easy as KB+M, but it's at least got controller support. You aim with the right stick.

Builds in 20 Minutes are diverse enough that you can still win if your aim is terrible -- there's an achievement or two for winning without firing a shot -- but I had a better time playing on PC.

 

[YangusKhan]

I mentioned Soulstone Survivors in my last post. Well you can play its demo for free until October 12th, and according to their more recent news post, they plan to put it into Early Access by end of October/early November. I played a couple runs of it last night and it's a decent time. It already feels good enough to be in Early Access, so the for the price of $0, you could do worse.

This demo has 6 characters, though 3 of those require several successful runs to earn enough currency for them. Its biggest gap right now IMO is map and objective variety; there's 3 playable maps, but they all feel the same to me, and furthermore each map has the same bosses? So I imagine they will address that as development continues, because yeah that won't have a lot of longevity to it otherwise. Also, like 20 Minutes Till Dawn, it seems to have a decent amount of manual aiming, I didn't dislike that on the Deck as much as I expected, so now I'm finally considering picking up 20 Minutes for real soon.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I've messed around a bit with 20 Minutes Till Dawn and gotten two survivals so far. Both were with essentially the same build: The 2nd character with her 7 base HP, flame cannon gun, all 3 main elemental effects with all 4 skills from each tree, spread-fire (4 fan in front and one behind) and a lot of rapid-fire boosts. The super-fast fire rate of the flame cannon means lightning procs like crazy even before you start boosting attack speed, you can get a lot of flame stuff to stack burn really high (like ticking for several hundred each time), freeze gets you great crowd control because of the fast and plentiful shots, and then if you get the elemental-combination skills (like the one where lightning hitting a burning enemy causes an extra explosion) you can just mow down hordes of enemies.

I also don't use manual aim because auto-aiming all around me makes a massive difference of difficulty, but I'm coming from Vampire Survivors so I'm not too thrilled about needing to do silly things like "hold down a button to attack."

I suppose I should unlock some of the other characters and try them (the 3rd one would synergize well with the flame cannon) but they have so few HP and the game is kinda stingy with its unlock currency so I'd rather use it on runes or weapons.

 

[Mogri]

Hey, what timing! Brotato released into early access today. The demo is probably still available. I will have to try both it and Soulstone Survivors.

 

[YangusKhan]

Hey, what timing! Brotato released into early access today. The demo is probably still available. I will have to try both it and Soulstone Survivors.

And as it turns out, Brotato is in a bundle with 20 Minutes Till Dawn, so I bought that.

Brotato is really hard? I did 4 runs and only won with the character that gets massive amounts of extra HP. Even if I made it further with the other characters, the final wave is A Lot to keep track of. Unlike other games in this genre, leveling up doesn't passively improve your survivability, so I'm sensing there comes a tipping point for any build where you need to invest in armor or HP or dodge or something. Because otherwise I was getting killed in 1 hit by a single enemy.

 

[Mogri]

It is very hard, yes! My only win so far has been with Mage, but I've gotten to the final wave several times now.

 

[Mogri]

Complaining still works: I got two more wins on my airplane ride. The first was Ranger, which I recommend: guns are very good, and Ranger has enough damage that you can spend the back half of the game building survival. The second was Bull, who can't equip weapons but explodes when damaged. This class is great, because several stats do nothing (range, attack speed) or are actually detrimental (dodge), so you just build raw damage, survival, and regen. I didn't kill the wave 20 boss, but I was never in danger of dying.

 

[YangusKhan]

I tried 20 Minutes for about an hour. There's a very nifty community controller layout for the Deck that makes playing it more comfortable, but I still had some control mistakes as I was playing. I suspect the shoot button is not ideal for my hands. Anyway it's definitely cool, and I also didn't know all the playable characters were women.

 

[YangusKhan]

Complaining still works: I got two more wins on my airplane ride. The first was Ranger, which I recommend: guns are very good, and Ranger has enough damage that you can spend the back half of the game building survival. The second was Bull, who can't equip weapons but explodes when damaged. This class is great, because several stats do nothing (range, attack speed) or are actually detrimental (dodge), so you just build raw damage, survival, and regen. I didn't kill the wave 20 boss, but I was never in danger of dying.

I got pretty far with Ranger the first time, but that was before I had my realization about survivability. So I think I can get there with only a few more attempts.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I tried Soulstone Survivors and it's basically, "What if one of these games but Diablo?" Part of that is the coat of paint on it, part is the skills and spells and their upgrades. Then they do the ADD MORE FEATURES!! thing too, which is interesting - not overwhelming so far, just more avenues for customization.
-Minion-summoning spells exist and that's a fun build you can do (and seems to be the most powerful thing I've run into so far, to boot - my first and only win so far was with a minion build).
-A skill tree exists but it's only marginally more involved than Vampire Survivors' upgrades and does the same basic thing.
-There are a lot of characters in there even if most aren't available yet. In addition to different starting stats, each one has upgraded weapons you can forge for different unique starter skills and stat spreads. Right now there's only one each but that will certainly expand later.
-Different maps have different crafting materials (and I presume eventually will have different enemies and bosses and such) that you use for said upgraded weapons.
-Something called "Runes" which will be in the full version but appears to be 5 slots for other upgrades/build options.

The combat has some aimed skills and some random skills so there's a mix of, say, 20 Minutes' gun style and VS's full-auto style. They might need to add more variety to how the random-enemy stuff is targeted because there's a relatively large number of "an AOE on a random point" which can lack reliability in certain situations. I guess a balance is your best bet, 1-2 targeted skills and the rest random. You get a dash. Being in 3D though, and the camera limitations that come with that, means that right now you get a less interesting and less varied terrain than you get from VS's different maps, so each one is essentially a visual skin with a different resource to collect.

 

[YangusKhan]

So it turns out the trick to 20 Minutes Till Dawn is elemental builds. I spent several runs playing as Diamond and trying to get the Grenade Launcher and Shotgun working. Gave up on that and just went Revolver, and maybe 15 minutes into that I pivoted to the Freeze upgrades after trying to pump up my damage and bounces and such. Turns out nothing could really touch me but I also couldn't kill much either.

I ended up winning and immediately started a run using Spark with the SMGs, going all-in on tri-element upgrades. It... it's not even close how strong that build is. I got hit once, nothing ever survived long enough to be a threat, I had screen-clearing attacks and essentially infinite ammo, it didn't matter which way I aimed my guns, and even just standing there not shooting was capable of killing things. This has to be actually overpowered.

 

[Mogri]

Brotato: I now have wins with Ranger, Mage, Mutant, Loud, Multitasker, Bull, and Soldier. Ranger was Danger 1 and Bull was Danger 2, but the rest are Danger 0, which is hard enough, thanks.

I'm finding the most success stacking HP and regen with a large dose of dodge on top. Damage is good to have, but mostly because it gets you the resources you need to achieve survivability.

 

[Paul le Fou]

So it turns out the trick to 20 Minutes Till Dawn is elemental builds. I spent several runs playing as Diamond and trying to get the Grenade Launcher and Shotgun working. Gave up on that and just went Revolver, and maybe 15 minutes into that I pivoted to the Freeze upgrades after trying to pump up my damage and bounces and such. Turns out nothing could really touch me but I also couldn't kill much either.

I ended up winning and immediately started a run using Spark with the SMGs, going all-in on tri-element upgrades. It... it's not even close how strong that build is. I got hit once, nothing ever survived long enough to be a threat, I had screen-clearing attacks and essentially infinite ammo, it didn't matter which way I aimed my guns, and even just standing there not shooting was capable of killing things. This has to be actually overpowered.

Yeah, that's the same thing I discovered, as mentioned above. Tri-elemental (especially with the flame cannon) is the way to go, it's insanely powerful. How did you kill stuff by standing and not shooting, though? Did you have summons, or maybe the floating weapons?

 

[Mogri]

My experience is a few patches old at this point, but my experience was frost+flame was the strongest build (lightning not nearly as good) followed by summons (equip grenade launcher for base damage but ideally stop firing it by the halfway mark -- you can get batgun to work, and I think it's stronger by the end, but it's not nearly as easy overall).

 

[YangusKhan]

Yeah, that's the same thing I discovered, as mentioned above. Tri-elemental (especially with the flame cannon) is the way to go, it's insanely powerful. How did you kill stuff by standing and not shooting, though? Did you have summons, or maybe the floating weapons?

I did have the passive that shoots lightning as long as I had a Holy Shield up, but also it was just like, 1 of my shots would bounce like crazy and apply so many status effects that it could kill 1 enemy, which would trigger my on-death effects that shot out more bullets and status effects. Plus! I had the upgrades for Vision Range, where enemies take damage inside your range and that damage also triggers my bullets' on-hit effects (ie. more status effects).

 

[Paul le Fou]

I tried Batgun with Abby, and that's a match made in heaven. Since they're homing, it doesn't matter that they fire randomly, so you can just constantly be spinning out bats, moving at full speed and firing faster than usual. Bats + effects (frost, fire, curse) and the extra-bullet effects (enemies launch 3 when they die, 10 more when you empty your clip) just fills the entire screen with an army of bats that apply all sorts of great status effects to enemies.

Tried the grenade launcher and I'll have to try it again when I'm not on the new temple level - it has nasty new explodey-enemies with a ton of HP, and it's more enclosed. I've yet to get very far at all in it. But finding "does bullet damage" effects to use with the grenade launcher does sound like fun. I did kill myself with it though, since I had the "3 bullets on death" thing which makes the field very chaotic. Maybe that one isn't such a good combo after all...

 

[YangusKhan]

I ran into that issue with the grenade launcher too. Shooting extra bullets with it is actually not great!

 

[Mogri]

Yeah, that's an instant loss condition. You only make that mistake once!

Further Brotato: Danger 3 with One-Handed using Shredder - I tried a lot of weapons, and this is the only one I can recommend. Danger 4 with Masochist, the Danger 3 win unlock. Masochist is unchanged from the demo, but the demo didn't have Blood Donation. Yes, the 1-damage tick from Blood Donation works with Masochist, and it's disgusting.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I finally got some clears without using Skeletal Warriors or other summons for safety, but I won't lie that it feels a lot more fraught. Summons are definitely the easiest way to go, at least early on; maybe building up more defenses in the skill tree helps that.

It shares with 20 Minutes the presence of status effects, but has more. Burn, poison, and bleed are all DoT (and I think there's a Hemorrhage too but I don't know what it does); Doom is single-boom DoT that insta-executes the enemy if their doom stack exceeds their current health (this is, as it turns out, very good). Individual skills have different strengths of each of these DoTs, so the burn from firebolt, the burn from fire wall, and the burn rider on all your attacks add different amounts of damage (and skills level up independently of each other), but as far as I know they all stack.

Frost slows, frailty increases damage they take, daze increases crit chance against them, and stun does...something (I don't think it simply stuns them, iirc?). Arcane explosion has an effect that increases the next source of damage against the enemy but I dunno if it's unique to that skill or not. There's also Wound, which gives a chance of doubling any given status effect applied to the enemy while it's active.

You can do some crazy stuff with this. I had a run where I picked up poison bolts early on, which do no damage but stack a powerful poison. Meh. Except then I got a talent that, every time I stack poison, I have a chance to stack doom as well, and suddenly I was stacking both on enemies pretty quickly, and only then did I realize how powerful Doom could be; the combination of poison and doom would trigger the Doom execution almost immediately on low enemies. On bosses, it would finish them off instantly at as high as 15%-ish health at times! There are a lot of powers that give you "When applying X, 50% chance to apply Y" which you can combine with "apply Y, 50% chance to apply Z." You can also get passives to have your attacks apply statuses, and many skills apply some status or other as well. Wound applies on Crit, and you can pair that with a power to guarantee a crit against 100% HP enemies, opening them with a wound and then stacking your effects extra-high. It's fun to get some really long icon chains going under the enemy HP bars.

Though, I think my favorite - and possibly the most effective? - stuff to focus on is multi-cast. You basically have a chance to cast any spell multiple times when its cooldown comes up. This can be more than 2, also, if your multiplier gets high enough, so you might be looking at skills that trigger 2-3 times every cooldown if you build it up right. And of course, cooldown reduction is always good across the board.

Crits and crit damage modifiers are other fun things to build up, make big number go boom.

Anyway, I'm really liking this one; it's very early with a lot of features obviously still in development, and I think it'll have pretty long legs as it continues development. I dunno if there'll be a paid early access or if it's a free EA demo until release, but I'll probably be following it throughout.

 

[YangusKhan]

Though, I think my favorite - and possibly the most effective? - stuff to focus on is multi-cast. You basically have a chance to cast any spell multiple times when its cooldown comes up. This can be more than 2, also, if your multiplier gets high enough, so you might be looking at skills that trigger 2-3 times every cooldown if you build it up right. And of course, cooldown reduction is always good across the board.

This was a neat mechanic I liked in the game too and I hadn't actually seen it before in other games.

Reading you type all that out now, I can definitely see now why you called it "Diablo but it's a VS game." I'm personally holding off from playing it more until it's officially in EA, but I'll probably get it then as soon as I can.

 

[shivam]

it's a sign of my age that i call these automatic geometry wars

 

[YangusKhan]

it's a sign of my age that i call these automatic geometry wars

You could also call them automatic Smash TV. Or Robotron.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Or automatic Gun Fights / Western Guns if you want to share one last fact with the world before you turn to dust.

 

[Paul le Fou]

It's just Asteroids, really

 

[YangusKhan]

It's just Asteroids, really

Man. How long until someone does make an Asteroids VS-like? With actual propulsion-based movement and everything??

 

[Torzelbaum]

Man. How long until someone does make an Asteroids VS-like? With actual propulsion-based movement and everything??

Or instead of Asteroids what if they base it on Blasteroids?