I love Vampire Survivors… it’s a game I can load up and just lose myself in its psychedelic wonder for hours, even when there are no Achievements on offer, I’ll happily play the game if I have a spare half an hour.
There’s something very alluring about playing a game where you are over-powered wiping out hundreds and thousands of enemies… if there’s an update or new DLC even better.
My last run was a coin harvesting affair, as characters have to be bought (and some have cost me upwards of 250,000 coins) it pays to have a small stash waiting… so I loaded it up and set the scenario just for collecting coins.
Sammy the Caterpillar, Disco of Gold Arcana card selected, endless run so no appearance from Death at 30 minutes, hyper setting ticked for a faster more intense game… and 60 minutes later, I hit level 1,000 with 475,000+ kills and over 3million coins collected.
I have dabbled in the “Adventure” mode, but the issue there is you’re effectively starting over from the beginning… very few characters to select, limited map options, no power/armour/health upgrades in play… and, and this is the kicker when compared to normal runs, you have to worry about being killed by the endless hordes of enemies.
So, for me, adventure mode is not really what I want to be doing.
Now I completed the first 2 adventures recently… because they pushed out an update and they added achievements linked to these… the 3rd adventure remains untouched.
I don’t really want to play as a weak and feeble character again… so when the game finally released on the PlayStation 4 and 5 did I really want to go through all that once more?
No… but it didn’t stop me.
The PlayStation 5 version comes with just 41 Trophies in the base game (the base game on Xbox currently shows 120 Achievements) but 22 DLC packs at launch, all free, which bring it up to the same number of Trophies as with the Xbox version… and a Platinum added in for good measure.
What this does mean is that, potentially, you’ll be working on more than a handful of different DLC packs at the same time… and while it was fun finishing a run back in the day and watching maybe 6 or 7 Achievements unlock, having experienced what someone described as “Bullet Heaven” going back and selecting a character who attacks every 3 or 4 seconds is going to be a shocker.
I’m sort of ashamed that I managed to Platinum the base game early Monday morning following a Thursday lunch time release, and that on the Friday I had to charge my PS5 controller twice as it ran out of power mid game… and that Monday was spent finishing the base game and all but the 2 large chunks of DLC and the latest update.
I currently sit at 178/221 Trophies unlocked, with 3 of those remaining being for triggering special moves with certain characters which will be easy to clean up, I’m then left with just the Moonspell and Foscari DLC packs to complete and the whole thing will be potentially cleaned up in just over a week… some way short of the 120+ hours that I’ve put into the Xbox version.
It becomes very clear while playing this that there is 1 of the new Darkana cards that breaks the game if you select it at the start… every time you level up it drops 1 or 2 items you can collect, and these can be simple bags of gold, to the candy box weapon icon which allows you to select another weapon.
At the end of 1 run, ostensibly just to survive 15 minutes with a certain character I had 12 fully evolved weapons (because you can also collect additional support items via the random level drop items), over 150,000 kills (and this was in a standard 30 minute run) and even more coins.
Consequentially, the only thing that hampered my completion of the Moonspell and Foscari DLC was that there were so many items on screen all at once, I couldn’t see my character let alone where I was supposed to be going.
Around 2am on the Friday morning the final Trophies popped… all 221 unlocked in around 8 days of play and maybe 36 hours… I may now have to play a full priced, open world, title to refresh my palette from this monumental indie title.