One of the vampire survivor review you will read on the internet

adendum : While the article was made in the middle of controverse related to the game due to the release of an article I can’t comment about because I can’t read it, and that some of the related discourse in qrt and stuff was on the back of my mind it’s not a response to theses controverses in particular or to someone precise but more of a vague amalgamate of various things I’ve read about the game across the years. So there is definitively arguments I neglected and stuff I didn’t talk about, a few goombas fallacy, you know the drill. It’s basically trying to lay some of my thought about the game on paper with a lack of a proper plan.

I think I played the game more than most people talking about it. Like my switch savefile have almost every achievement except for the adventures ones and a few "kill 100000 enemies with x character". I was at Avignon and I needed a game that only used the touch screen to wait hours before seeing a show. So unless you’re gonna argue that adventures massively change the game (and having played with them a little bit they kinda don’t), I think I’m qualified to explain what is the problem with Vampire Survivors.

I don’t believe slot machine is the right angle.

OK so I haven’t read Addiction by design, so I’m not saying that with 100% certitude. However, if the goal of vampire survivors is to be the perfect slot machine game, then there is a lot of decision that are hard to stuff into that point of view, especially if you try to examine what was added on top of magic survival. The level up upgrades have no visible rarity when it would have been easy to add it to make it feels like a jakepot, a limitation on the number of equipable weapons have been added, making bad decision more painful than in magic survival, you have multiple ways of mitigating RNG with rerolls, banish and weapons that can evolve without the need for an item, exp a physical element first and foremost instead of something you can get just by killing enemies and progression through money that cap surprisingly quick.

The comparison between Vampire Survivors and slot machines often come from poncle having worked on slot machines application and proudly saying that he used that experience for the game. This got grape-vined into more or less "poncle is a slot machine designer that don’t care about video games beyond implementing his casino design" which is a big exageration. Everything seems to point out at poncle having a grunt level job, probably being a coder or something like that. The use of experience could refer to litteraly anything, and games that use visual or audio inspired from slot machines weren’t lacking before Vampire Survivors. If poncle have been tainted by slot machines, then your favorite japanese designer is probably drowning in this stuff for working on a gacha at a creative level for years. Yet I don’t see people arguing that Kingdom Hearts 3 is a slot machine for being directed by Kingdom Hearts Unchained veteran Tetsuya Nomura and having enemy randomly drop item or something like that. I’ve honestly seen people vaguely saying that vampire survivor was a slot machine because "the option you get with level up are random". By this logic, are Magic player doing slot machine competition because they can’t choose what card they pick in their decks?

You might think that this isn’t an earned comparison, but I think a large part of the dissonance between the argument that most roguelite are slot machines and why people aren’t just directly downloading slot machines rom or playing casinos in rpg is that most people that play theses games play them thinking they are about managing luck rather than suffering it. Take the early bats for exemple. The easiest way to kill them is to get lucky and to get a garlic. What if you don’t ? You might think you just got unlocky, but a better player can know that the whip can do the job just fine. Or maybe you can do trick shot with the cross instead. Or maybe you don’t need to kill theses bats at all and can just use a crown or something to bypass the exp requirement. On paper the game feels like it’s about understanding the various use cases of weapons and items to get the maximum amount of winning combinaison and increase the odd of victory compared to a beginner player with equal amount of money.

Off course all of that is theory. In practice there could be any number of things that can make a roguelite not at all that, like poorly balanced item that the player should always take.

I sure hope there isn’t a big feature simplyfing the problem to "pick that one item if you have a specific weapon" or late-game tools so op you can just ignore what you actually get from your level up isn’t there?

What playing the game is like.

I have listed a bunch of features with how they could contradict from an authorial point of view that vampire survivor is a slot machine, and maybe begin to argue that vs is a good game with deckbuilding elements or something like that. However, what must also be examined is how the game play in practice. Here is how to win almost every one of your game of Vampire Survivors with minimum rng required :

• Pick a darkana at your starting arcana, maybe two. Moonlight Bolero was very solid at the update release because it feels like the odd of getting another arcana chest were high, and it’s still usefull to quickly level your weapons. Hail from the future is still good, and some characters might need an arcana that give them rewards so they can survive now rather than having bigger number later.
• Banish is a scam, forget it. It requires way too many levels once you have dozen of weapon to make a meaningful difference in terms of odd of getting a specific weapon. Just use reroll if the game force you to take something you don’t like
• Fusions weapons are a scam, forget them. The odd of getting the one weapon you need in the list is way too small. 
• Instead, get 6 random weapon asap. The specific hardly matters. Only pick items if they both aren’t in the stage and are needed for evolution, or you really really really need them
• Then, once you have the 6 weapons, all the time the game will ask you for a new element, it will only be one of the way fewer by comparison item. You can easily pick the required one for your evolution with a few rerolls.
• Once you have your full loadout, if you are on a stage with lot of item, pick the Mad Groove card. 

Congratulation ! You just won the game ! Yeah in practice the actual reason why Vampire Survivors isn’t a slot machine is because there simply is ultra reliable strategies where you can barely care about what you pick and still win. This doesn’t work litteraly 100% of the time, some character and stage combinaison can still maybe require you to think a little and make a short term choice to avoid death, but it’s a very reliable strategy. If you haven’t unlocked too many things yet, simply try to get an evolution asap above anything else and you should progress much faster than thinking too hard.

And I mean this shit isn’t hard to figure out. Slay the Spire can still kick my ass at low ascention and I still figured out a "winning combinaison" for vampire survivors. They have to find this stuff in testing. They just didn’t care.

So if it’s not a slot machine or a game about managing luck, what is it ? I think it’s the rpg equivalent of theses beat’em up where you can do 100 hit combos with barely any effort. A game making you do things that are associated with high level of play without the actual effort, except this time it’s rpg build instead of complex combos. This is an interpretation that explain the presence of elements detracting from the slot machine, as well as the structure of the dlc : Unlock a character, level it’s weapon to unlock it, evolve it to unlock a new character. See the new flavor of op, unlock a new one, rince and repeat.

What’s the problem then ?

Well for starters it makes for a game that is kinda boring imo. And I mean "you know you won by the halfway mark" is a common point of reproche for the game.

You might be thinking "Just turn off arcana idiot". But the game have tons of other ways it can be broken anyways. What if I use a character like queen sigma anyways? What if I stop applying hurry and bloody modificator because it’s not like any achievement requires them? What if I use the excludes on all weapons and items except a few ones I know are good ?

There is no real game here; just a bunch of options you can try searching into to get maybe something that stimulates you. This kind of shit would never fly in a board games. It’s however a common problem in video games, where having rarely any separation between the "material" layer and the "rules of the games" layer can result in some games that don’t know what they want to be except the potential of a game.

Something else to point out is the abondance of unlockables. Unlockables are in video games a way to make people do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. However, is making people things they wouldn’t do otherwise necessarly good ? For exemple, most people dislike the 15 minutes melee mode in smash bros. It’s too long and boil down to spamming things for a lot of minutes, at least before the ai ramp up. But it’s still something that a lot of people have done because it allow to unlock an additional stage for the game.

When playing vampire survivors a few years ago, I noticed that my motivation decreased a lot when I unlocked every arcana card. This isn’t necessarly normal; lots of game have no unlockable and still remain fun to play. People didn’t need unlockable skins to keep playing flappy bird or 2048, to quote some relatively recent exemple, since i’ll admit finding a popular game that isn’t a decade old without any unlockable can be kinda hard, but that’s speak more of unlockable popularity I think.

If your game is repititive, easy, and played for the unlockable before people litteraly erase their saves to reunlock everything from scratch, what do you have ? Do you have a game ? Or do you have a collection of 15 minutes melee ?

Here is a list of more fun games to play and debate about than vampire survivors

-Slay the spire : It’s a game about picking one option in a random selection of option so that your deck that randomly pick card may not screw you over with def cards when the enemy is initializing a statut. There is more than one approximate vs hater that might be tricked into saying it’s a slot machine, which I am not gonna comment on the veracity of the accusation but it would at least create an interesting debate 🍿

-20 minutes till dawn : Vampire Survivors but I actually loose at it so it must be better. You can make something of an argument for the game having a deckbuilding aspect here, because each power up get can put 2 power up in the pools, meaning that people simply trying to play "search for the adjective" can quickly

-Touhou Library Survivors : Didn’t get the chance of playing it, but being a vampire survivors clone made by someone that thought that the perma progression and the evolution were a bad idea is at least a good start.

-Nova drift : 20 minutes till dawn but maybe better ? Also I have not played it.

-Dragon Quest : Is breaking a vase or beating fodder enemies the equivalent of actionning a lever to roll the spin of a drop ? You have 4 hours