And if my previous post didn’t give it away, I’m smitten with Vampire Survivors. I love the meta-progression, the need to find characters through exploration or unlock conditions, and how the the trickle of new characters provides a constant search for new evolved abilities.
I constantly want to break the maximization limits by filling up my attack inventory before picking up any attacks that pre-populated in the stage, but this is starting to become a liability, because I’m getting so many attacks and items that I can’t level them up fast enough to evolve before enemy scaling kills me or I hit the time limit.
I finally hit a bit of a plateau in the base game where I’ve got hundreds of thousands of gold more than I have upgrades and characters to spend it on. I could have just started aggressively pursuing specific characters and other unlock goals, but I decided to spring for the DLC. By which I mean… all of it.
The first one is based on Japanese folklore, so you’ve got various oni and tanuki and kenku besieging you. All the attacks I’ve found feel very indirect, and only a subset of the original weapons and items are available. There’s a separate gold progression, as well, but using weapons and items in the DLC stages allows them to start appearing in the main game. The DLC maps have so far felt a little more gimmicky than the original maps: the first one is a survival challenge against a very strong enemy; another map has you wandering through narrow tunnels in an isolated mountain. It’s pretty refreshing.
…the second DLC is Among Us. It’s fine? The map feels small compared to the base game maps (or Ode to Castlevania), but it feels very authentic to the one time I played actual Among Us. In a fun twist, many of the enemies are “disguised” as innocuous objects at first and cannot be damaged until you get close enough. The weapons are very thematic, while the items are “mini crewmates” who follow you around, but don’t really do anything until you can evolve the corresponding weapon, at which point they stop taking up space in your inventory. I was able to max out on new weapons and evolve them all on my first try, which finished like 40% of the DLC in a single session. Before I continued, I decided to try—
—the Contra DLC, which felt a bit harder than Among Us at first. The first character doesn’t have great crowd control options initially, but it wasn’t long before I found a character that added the Spread gun to the mix. The Contra stages I’ve seen so far bring back the heavy tiling of the base game, but they present more navigational challenges due to a mix of open areas with choke points, bridges, and the occasional bit of circuitous pathing. A later level surprised me with an on-screen overlay announcement reporting that a boss approached in a certain area of the map, and that I had to make my way over to it. Once I got there, it had an animated entrance and restricted movement to make it seem like I was standing on a platform shooting into the background. Pretty cool.
But I think Ode to Castlevania is cooler. It’s just the one map, as far as I can tell, which starts to be a little bit of a drag, but there are a lot of secrets to find and even more characters to unlock. I like that you can see all the traditional subweapons on display in the workshop; I thought maybe you’d come across a way to collect them, but then it occurred to me that they’re all either already specific base game weapons, or in at least one case, it’s part of the attack generated by a Castlevania character’s evolved weapon.
Lots of bosses all over the place, each of which drops at least a chest, if not also something extra. I haven’t been fast enough to clear every boss in a single session yet, but I’m thinking that’s gotta be the requirement for an unlock I haven’t read yet.
I still don’t understand several of the pickups: heart refreshes seem to govern your progression through the stage, but sometimes they drop randomly from enemies, and there’s at least one area I haven’t been able to get into regardless of how many I collect. Mirrors seem to refresh all my cooldowns, I think? If they do anything else, I’m not sure what. Similarly, I know that getting HEADS on a coin is a screen clear, but does TAILS have an effect? I’d love to know if anybody has figured this out.