The biggest Achievement streak I have was 40 consecutive days covering most of March 23 and the start of April 23 where I unlocked a total of 296 Achievements… this surpassed my previous best of 38 days when I started Crapfest at the end of 2020 which ran through January 2021 where, due to the nature of playing a crappy title every day for a month I also unlocked 662 Achievements.
I mention this as a huge part (at least a third) of the 296 total came from 1 game… Vampire Survivors.
The game currently sits with 196 Achievements for 1,500 Gamerscore… this is the home of the 5 point Achievement, and it hands them out like the Pharmacy at the White House handed out medication during the Orange Buffoons tenure… it’s easy to pick up 5 or 6 Achievements in a single run early on.
The game has that “one more run” element that meant my first quick play of the game ended up lasting 3 hours.
Sadly, and this is the same for a lot people, once all the Achievements pop and the game has been 100% completed… the lure of the game wanes… more DLC will no doubt land, and I’ll buy it on release, but the urge to play this, previously untouched, genre remains… a new Vampire Survivors had to be found… say hello to Army of Ruin.
Whereas Vampire Survivors (hereby referred to as VS) looks like it could run on my old Commodore 64, Army of Ruin looks like a current gen game… HD graphics, flash explosions, no obvious slowdown when the action gets manic (there are times at the end of a run on VS where it’s impossible to see what’s happening, you’re so over-powered that the whole screen is a mass of attacking chaos and even on a Series X starts to see the game judder along) and a decent tune plays continuously.
It offers more of a challenge, the 5th (and hardest) area named “Shrine” is a proper test if you’re not prepared for it… after over 20 hours of play to date that’s the area where I’ve made least progress towards, and looking at the Achievements I’ve yet to unlock, and the area which contains the final few Achievements if I were to get to the stage where I think I could complete the game.
Each of the 5 areas (Graveyard, Forest, Forge, Glacier and Shrine) has 3 levels consisting of 10, 15 and 20 waves of enemy attacks… these are 1 minute apart… at the end of these the boss appears, kill them and the run is over and Victory is proclaimed.
Each of the 3 levels has 3 different challenges all with their own Achievement… 1 for completing the level at all, and 2 for meeting various weapon-based challenges such as getting Meteorite to stage 5.
On top of these there is an infinite run setting where the goal is to hit 30 minutes… so 10 stars for each area.
Then you can add 6 challenges of varying difficulty to each level, so completing the first Graveyard level with a certain character, with enemies having more health, less XP on offer, damage reduced and so on… these challenges unlock other weapons, trinkets (which add status boosts and can help evolve a weapon to it’s highest level) and characters.
Most importantly… the game is fun.
The similarities to VS are obvious with the weapons, Garlic (which in VS was shown by an area surrounding the player with an area where any enemy entering took damage) is replaced by Toxic Stench which does the same thing, the circling Bibles of VS (which circled the player as they moved) are replaced by Meteorites, Holy Water (which dropped bottles of holy water around the player which damaged enemies as they passed over) are replaced with spears that produce electrified pools… and so on… to evolve a weapon to it’s higher state you need to pick up a trinket which matches that power, so a fire weapon will be evolved by a trinket such as Magnifying Glass which will, every 30 seconds, damage every enemy on screen with fire… the level of damage and delay between bursts are altered as you level up the trinket, so it will become every 20 seconds for higher damage and so on.
I’m at the stage where I’ve unlocked 79/98 Achievements… and those remaining are starting to look hard… completing a level without moving, or taking damage… there are solutions online (thanks to TrueAchievements.com) and from those I need to complete some of the challenges to unlock a particular character or item to help me.
If I don’t then this is in danger of being the first game this year where I don’t achieve 100% completion… and, being honest at this point, that’s looking fairly likely… the game is on PS4 and PS5 and some of the harder Achievements didn’t make it across… there are only 55 Trophies to unlock, and those linked to “not moving”, “take no damage” and “don’t open any chests” are all absent… a second purchase is starting to look likely here.
March 21st
I’m close to hitting my ceiling as far as Achievements go… what remains are mostly those that require a hell of a lot of upgrades from the store and the money to buy those would require a lot of grinding… so while I’m not giving up on unlocking more Achievements, it will take many, many hours of continued play to get to the point where I could realistically expect to unlock them.
It’s a fun game, but while it certainly edges Vampire Survivors in looks and audio… the large difficulty spike for the Shrine area, and the Achievement structure lets it down a little… 83/98 Achievements unlocked currently isn’t a bad effort, but I don’t really find grinding a fun mechanic… it’s why I’ve not hit Level 100 in Starfield yet… whereas Vampire Survivors is a game I can play for fun without feeling the need to constantly be unlocking things to have fun.