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

[Mogri]

Continued Brotato: The grind for Danger 5 continues. The way it's written, Danger 5 sounds like it only changes the last wave, and yet I haven't had a run make it to that wave, so I might as well be failing Danger 4 runs. Here's what I've tried:

Pacifist: If you're not keeping up in the damage race anyway, may as well go with a class that doesn't need to kill things, right? I might go back to this class, but at the time, I was having trouble even building pure survival.

Bull: Similar to Pacifist in that you're focusing your build on survival, except you start with much better survival stats and can (and must) kill things. My most successful run picked up Blood Donation (a completely terrible item except when it's actually amazing), allowing me to deal damage without having to take a ton. I might've won that one, but the ribcage enemies make those late waves a real nightmare.

Anything with an Ethereal build: The scaling from Ethereal weapons is just too slow. The two best classes for Ethereal are Loud, who gets a bunch of extra enemies, and Ghost, who gets a big damage bonus to Ethereal weapons. Ghost is a non-starter: it dies in two hits as early as wave 3. Loud could get off the ground with a lot of luck, maybe.

I won Danger 4 with Masochist. Haven't tried it on Danger 5, but then I'd never have won without Blood Donation, so I'm not sure how repeatable that success is.

 

[Mogri]

Brotato: The game got a patch, and I lost all my progress. I'm not sure whether the two are related, since I was playing in offline mode until I quit out today, and when I went back in, it was a new version with none of my unlocks.

Anecdotally, the new patch seems much easier. I got five straight wins on Danger 0-4, which got me most of the character unlocks I had before plus at least one I didn't. In particular, it feels like enemies are dropping more materials now at all Danger levels. Checking the patch notes, I don't see anything about that, but I do see that the player hitbox is smaller now, the big enemies have less health, and a couple waves have fewer enemies.

Anyway, this has the funny result of most of my characters being unlocked but not the one you unlock by dying. I did confirm that my progress is saving now; as much as I like the game, I don't think I'd go through a third round of this.

 

[YangusKhan]

I finally played Brotato again and got a Danger 1 win with Ranger. Building up my Dodge definitely saved my bacon potato in the end, and I even managed to kill the Wave 20 boss rather than outlive it.

 

[Mogri]

Boss kills are definitely more satisfying! They're also way harder to pull off.

I've finished Danger 0 with almost everyone at this point. My takeaway: you can win without damage, but you can't win without survivability. Here's my breakdown:

HP: It's essential, and it's uncapped. You can get by with 40 or so with some builds, but you'll always be happy to have more.

Regen%: It's worth getting a point or two early on, since with positive regen, you'll always heal at least 1 per 5 seconds. If you're stacking HP, getting a lot of regen is the most reliable survival in the game. If you're not, then you don't mind this going negative by the end of the game.

Life steal: Capped at 10 HP/second, which is a lot but also not enough on its own. You'll want Armor or Dodge for further mitigation.

"HP from pickups": Early on, pickups are one of your primary sources of recovery, and I don't advise taking an early penalty to this pseudo-stat. By about wave 10, they won't keep up with the damage you're likely to take, and there aren't enough ways to increase this to change that fact.

Armor/Dodge: I'm lumping these together because they're under the same "damage mitigation" umbrella. Dodge caps at 70% (except for the Ghost class), and Armor has decreasing returns. Until you hit the Dodge cap, each point of Dodge is more effective than the last. That means you want to go all in on Dodge if you're going in at all. If you won't reach at least 50%, don't bother. On the other hand, Armor is the only defensive stat where going negative actually matters, so you can't afford to dump Armor. Even if Armor is not your primary mitigation strategy, you'll want around 10 by the end of the game.

Medical weapons: The bonus for Medical synergy is regen, but the weapons themselves have a huge amount of life steal. You need some method of recovery, and that method can actually just be two or three of these if you've got enough mitigation.

 

[YangusKhan]

I don't know how Life Steal works with Elemental damage weapons. Does the burning status effect from a wand, or those chain lightnings from the electric shiv, let you Life Steal or is it just from the primary attack of a weapon?

 

[Mogri]

My best guess is that each weapon rolls life steal once per attack -- so, for example, a hammer can give you 1 HP even if it hits five enemies. So you should actually get more out of a Minigun than a Medical Gun once your life steal reaches about 10%.

It's hard to be sure because there's so much going on at any given time past the first few waves, but that's consistent with my experience.

 

[YangusKhan]

Boneraiser Minions is pretty fun but I am either bad at it or need more meta upgrades, because I still didn't get very far after trying like 5 runs.

 

[Mogri]

Yeah, the meta upgrades are huge. I'm not a big fan of meta upgrades in this genre, but Boneraiser Minions at least makes them very easy to unlock. You'll get the basic ones in a few hours. The long tail ends up being the class upgrades, since they require either a boss soul or 3333 gold, and you get (I think) 3 boss souls in a winning run, while your gold caps at 9999 (a number which is not hard to reach). I popped back into the game last night after not having played for a month or so, found that there were two new classes, and nearly finished getting everything for them after playing for about an hour.

I finally got my Danger 5 Brotato win a couple days ago: Pacifist with three Hands and three Medical weapons. The Medical weapons were key: you don't get much benefit from extra Hands, and the lifesteal from the Medical weapons is extremely necessary. I had an earlier Danger 5 Gladiator who died with 5 seconds left in wave 20, but the Pacifist was fairly painless with the right build.

With all the unlocks finished, I've taken a break from Brotato. I gave Soulstone Survivors a try yesterday. It's decent. My biggest problem is that the game becomes illegible pretty quickly as the screen fills up with attacks. Like Boneraiser Minions, there are some significant meta unlocks, but most of it is alternate classes and the like. Being that it's a demo, most of the class progression is gated anyway.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I picked up Brotato and tried it out. My first run made it to Wave 16 I think, but the farthest I've gotten is 19. That I did on a Ranger who ended up with crazy HP regen - I got a legendary couch item along with other regen, good speed penalties, and decent lifesteal, and was healing faster than I could take damage (until I wasn't). Having read the above posts I'll try again while focusing more on survival.

I'm not as big a fan of this one, I think, because for some reason I don't like that it happens in discrete waves. It's also the simplest, arena-wise. But I'm willing to poke at it a bit longer.

20 Minutes is fun but I dunno how many other builds I'll find as effective as heavy-elemental on flame cannon or bats, which will just lead to more disappointment.

I have a feeling Soulstone Survivors is gonna be the one, at least for me, but I'm also seeing how much they continue to release and when. Right now a bit more diversity by character would be welcome, and some balance adjustments, but of course it's not even in EA so it's got a ways to go.

 

[YangusKhan]

Brotato just got a balance patch today that actually changes up survivability some. Everything gets +1 HP on level up now, and HP regen scaling was changed to make it regen faster rather than % of HP. But on the flipside, Armor and Dodge got slight nerfs. Haven't tried a run with this patch yet but it's an important change (plus a bunch of other stuff).

Also for this thread, Nomad Survival is now at 1.0 and out of Early Access. I've kind of cooled on the game a little because I don't quite understand what amount of upgrades the game expects me to have on the hardest map. But it's still a nice change from other games simply because of how less over-the-top your character ends up being.

 

[YangusKhan]

Soulstone Survivors entered Early Access today, with a $9.99 price tag. It's pretty decent. There hasn't been too many improvements over the demo version, but the big one they added is a graphics slider to turn up the transparency of special effects, so now I can actually see what is happening. There's a lot of stuff to unlock, but the map variety is still non-existent; you're gonna be seeing the exact same wolves and snakes and goblins etc. on every map. Endless mode is fine in theory but in practice now it doesn't work very well, because it just means enemies become massive damage sponges by the end of Endless 1. They've already made an announcement that they're gonna change it. I haven't played with Curses yet or unlocked any Runes either.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I've been playing a bit. OK, a lot. They really need some different enemy loadouts on different maps, because fighting the same one over and over again is getting to be quite a drag. But I like the vastly expanded new array of skills and spells, and that you can unlock more. I don't like that only the 6 characters from the prologue have any extra weapons to unlock so far.

I've been doing curses and getting through all the first- and second-level curses isn't bad, but the 3rd-level gets nuts. Not only are there more enemies, more elites, and more HP, but you get to fight two lords at once. It's as fun as it sounds (which is to say, it has potential to be cool but in practice it's a slog). I've cleared curse III just one time (on the wrong map; I needed to clear it on a different map, which strikes me as cruel, for the achievement to to unlock a specific character) and frankly don't know how sustainable it's supposed to be. I've maxed out the entire skill tree and there's honestly kind of a ceiling on how many red circles you can avoid standing in when there are so many around. I guess I'll keep trying out different characters and builds and see if any of those make it more doable.

 

[Rosewood]

I finally played Brotato again and got a Danger 1 win with Ranger. Building up my Dodge definitely saved my bacon potato in the end, and I even managed to kill the Wave 20 boss rather than outlive it.

Thanks for mentioning that you can outlive the boss. I thought you had to defeat it in a certain amount of time, and that's led to a lot of unnecessarily mashed potatoes. I've now beat the game with 7 of the characters (on lv. 0. one thing at a time!).

 

[ShakeWell]

Entropy Survivors is only a demo so far, but it's fun, though like 20 Minutes Till Dawn, you do have to push buttons to attack, so it's perhaps contentious.

Gunsuit Guardians is a fun one still in Early Access from Matt Glanville, who also did Dungeon Deathball and Switch 'n' Shoot.

The Deeprock Galactic one of these is also now in Early Access and I haven't played it myself, but people seem to really like it.

 

[air_show]

So I played Wedding Witch after seeing it on Game Grumps and this style of gameplay ate my soul. After playing it for a week or two I found myself jonesing for more, and what came up on my search was Death Must Die

It's pretty good. Granted I'm still new to this genre, and it's an early access game so it doesn't really feel like a complete game, but it's hella fun. I dumped well over 20 hours into it over the week or so I've had it.

Anyway now I can scour this thread for more to satisfy my new addiction.

 

[4-So]

Death Must Die is pretty good, yeah.

My favorite of these is Halls of Torment, which replaced VS as my go-to in the genre. I'm a much bigger fan of the creepy-for-1996 aesthetic, and the soundtrack is more my speed.

 

[JBear]

The Deeprock Galactic one of these is also now in Early Access and I haven't played it myself, but people seem to really like it.

I'm people! I really like it!

(Although I feel like I got snookered, because I got a wire crossed and started playing it because I thought it had just left early access. Ah well.)

I got bored of Vampire Survivors ages ago and never really glommed onto another one, but this one is really clicking for me. It probably doesn't hurt that I have 100 hours logged in DRG and really enjoy the ways that this game references that one, but a lot of folks seem to be enjoying it who have never touched DRG. I feel like it is different from VS in a lot of small, interesting ways that add up to make it feel quite different overall.

Rock and Stone!

 

[Rosewood]

Reporting back to say that I beat Brotato difficulty 4 for the first time with the hilarious Bull. I haven't entirely decided if dodge is crucial for this character or not, but it seems that some combination of regen, HP, armor (and buffed explosion if you can get it) at least, does well for him. I didn't manage to get through rank 5 after a few tries, but he seems like a good choice for a first, since he is easy to play.

It was a bit of an adjustment to go back to characters who can't just tank everything.

 

[Mogri]

My take was always that Dodge is dissynergistic with Bull, since Bull needs to take damage to proc. I was never really sure! I enjoy dodge-stacking on most characters, though.

 

[JBear]

A friend asked me to explain what made Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor click for me, and I effort-posted, so I thought I may as well post here in case anyone is curious:

Well, speaking for me specifically, it's dripping in DRG theming and humour, but I know lots of folks who are loving it that have never played DRG. As far as what sets it apart mechanically:

• There are 4 "classes" with difference specialties: The Scout is mobile and dodgy, the Engineer focuses on using weapon emplacements, the Digger is really good at chewing through rock, and the Gunner is kind of tanky and shoot bugs good. Each class has a further trio of load-outs that you can choose between that specialize them further.
• Each run is 5 floors. Each floor has a timeline at the top with specific "events" outlined on it that trigger when the timeline reaches them, like an enemy swarm, or a supply drop (which requires you to clear out a landing zone to obtain unique buff items-- also the drop squashes any bugs it lands on), culminating with a boss that you need to kill before your evac drill pod will show up, at which point you have 30 seconds to book it and get to the next floor.
• On each run, there's a heavy focus on mining. There are two basic resources that you primarily mine that you can use to buy upgrades between floors, as well as rarer resources that persist between runs and are used to unlock permanent buffs.
• That same focus on mining also leads to a heavy focus on using mining as evasion and crowd control. The bugs all have very simple AI: they are trying to touch you via their shortest path. You can dig through walls to evade them, or exploit their pathing to channel them into corridors.
• You begin each run with a single fixed weapon dictated by class and loadout. At specific level thresholds, you are offered a choice of additional weapons, again dictated by class and loadout, for a total of four weapons each run.
• After every level-up, you are presented a set of 3 choices of upgrades, with a huge array of possibilities including stuff like max health, reload speed, move speed, crit rate, pickup radius, damage, etc, or more specific upgrades which allow you to level up one of your weapons by increasing its specific damage, fire rate, or reload speed. Any of these upgrades can have a rarity that ranges from common, uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary, which determines the magnitude.
• Weapon-specific upgrades increase that weapon's level, and each weapon offers you a choice of custom upgrades at specific level break-points that allow you to modify it in potentially run-warping ways.

 

[Baudshaw]

Trying out an extremely small and weird game called Days of Doomsday. There's barely any information about it. I completed the first few chapters, and it's extremely similar to Vampire Survivors (even suspiciously similar, with stuff such as the bat swarm and the plant ring). However, there's one big difference: it's a more story-based game. The story itself isn't that important, but instead of an endless survival game, you have progression within each stage, ramping up the difficulty with each part.

 

[Paul le Fou]

While everyone else has been doing VS's Ode to Castlevania, I've been playing Halls of Torment. It's pretty good!

At first I felt like it lacked in originality. Many of the moves and mechanics are straight out of other games in the genre (I know there's a lot of cannibalism, but the frost/burn/spark effects come straight from 20 Minutes Till Dawn, for example (I wonder if they were original there or lifted from elsewhere too)). But the different versions of abilities and the gear system are pretty interesting and allow for some fun build variety.

But it also plays really well and the agony system saved me from a feeling of impending boredom by adding new twists to the formula (extra chest drops with stronger versions of loot, for example). I'm still trying to hunt down the last ingredients for more potions but the necklace seems to have stopped working for some reason.

Some of the stats could use a bit of rebalancing - Block feels kind of useless on all but 1-2 characters, for example, whereas defense is always good and useful. I'm still never entirely sure how good Force really is on any given character.

Also, the Diablo 1 aesthetics don't really do much at all for me, but I can see them being a draw for others. \

All in all, a good entry and worth checking out, even if it doesn't revolutionize the genre or anything.

 

[madhair60]

I am intrigued by this first-person one, Vampire Hunters. Though not £10 intrigued.

Save 25% on Vampire Hunters on Steam

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[Paul le Fou]

So I picked up Deep Rock Galactic Survivor and have been messing around with that. As far as I can tell, the gunner is FAR better than the Scout or engineer (I can somewhat reliably scrape out wins with the gunner, even on mastery levels, but have yet to clear with either of the others). Just unlocked the fourth class but haven't tried it yet. Meta progression (buying stat updates between runs) is pretty slow, too.

It definitely does innovate in the space with its narrow corridors, mutable stage/walls, and mining as a mechanic. Some good tension between mechanics in there (I really need more gold, which is quite scarce, but it would face me away from the enemy for X seconds, can I afford that? What leeway do my weapons allow me?). And the gun variety is different at a base level than the average survival autoshooter that I've played (that's what we're calling them now, right?). The weapon mastery stuff mode is interesting too - do a short run with only one weapon and if you beat it, you get a permanent buff to that weapon's damage in all other modes.

I'm not as big a fan of the very limited/automated aiming; I wish I had a bit more control there after having played Halls of Torment, especially because there are so many times I really need a piercing shot to go into the massive crowd behind me but there's juuuust one little guy in front of me that gets attacked instead. Or because having to stop moving and turn around to face the enemy for certain reasons (for maybe 1.5 seconds until they catch up and you have to run again, rinse and repeat) can get a bit tiresome, especially when you're trying to burn down a boss.

 

[JBear]

I'd say all 4 classes are pretty well-balanced (although each subclass within them is also quite different). Scout was my favourite initially, eventually to be supplanted by Gunner, but not because I thought it was easier or better (I'm up to 4-skull wins with all of the classes, IIRC), but because I just really love the heavy autocannon (even after it was nerfed). Default Driller is probably my least favourite, just because I hate the butt gun.

Maybe take a look at some of the achievement unlocks? Several of them gesture at specific playstyles that might help you grok some of the other classes better.

I assume you're aware of this, but each weapon has unique aiming mechanics. If you're annoyed at turning to face bosses, maybe try something like the sniper rifle that shoots at the highest HP monster in sight?

I am intrigued by this first-person one, Vampire Hunters. Though not £10 intrigued.

Vampire Hunters is great. It's just the Moe NRA joke from the Simpsons where he glues 5 guns together, made into a game. Tape a shotgun to a rocket launcher to an uzi to a cat and point them all down a hallway full of monsters. It doesn't have a lot of staying power, but it's a very fun diversion while it lasts.

 

[Paul le Fou]

the butt gun.

Well now I HAVE to try that class

 

[Mogri]

It's just the Moe NRA joke from the Simpsons where he glues 5 guns together, made into a game.

Speaking of Brotato! The expansion is out, and it's More Brotato. It's a game I've sunk 80 hours into, and while the expansion doesn't radically overhaul anything, the new characters, items, and Curse mechanism are worth the asking price.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Update on the Butt Gun: it might be my favorite gun, because so much time is spent running away and mining and it covers both cases well. I also like the Driller's beam weapons even if they don't feel as powerful or as tanky as the gunner overall.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I'm getting mad at DRGS. I seem to have hit a progression wall in the "main" games - hazard 2 in biome 2. I just can't break through it. But meta-progression seems to go so sloooooowly, and there are sooooo many other avenues for sloooow progression like weapon masteries and class masteries and such, and it feels like it's turning into a grind without nearly enough momentum forward. I might shelve it for a bit.

I will say, I do like the weapon masteries to a degree - it's actually fun to play a mini-run with one weapon, since you can actually max it out pretty easily and get its crazy powerful versions. But still, there are so many of them and you have to unlock each one and then get meager buffs for each run and it's just part of the larger grist mill.

 

[Mogri]

I'm getting mad at DRGS.

Just say no.