Before there was Vampire Survivors there was Geometry Wars. Like, long before. Originally released as a mini-game for the first Xbox’s Project Gotham Racing 2, the series peaked with Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved as a launch title for Xbox Live Arcade and then a second time with the Wii’s Geometry Wars: Galaxies. Like Vampire Survivors, Geometry Wars had one you, millions of them, and an overpowered fighter that was eventually going to be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. Vampire Survivors wrapped the whole thing in a Castlevania theme, removed aiming, and let the player overpowering reach wonderfully ludicrous heights, but the two share a huge amount of DNA. The only real surprise, now that Geometry Survivor has released, is that it took this long for someone to merge them.
There is no such thing as too many particles or too much color
Geometry Survivor is exactly what its name makes it sound like, which is a survivors-style game borrowing the Geometry Wars aesthetic. Starting off with a basic pea-shooter you take out enemies one at a time while leveling up, choosing one power-up from from a group of three random ones each time. Unlike a lot of games of this type the choices are fairly stripped down, being mostly all weapons aside from the lone magnet-range upgrade. There are seven weapon slots, one of which is filled at the start, and each one can be upgraded an additional three times. Oddly enough, actual guns only make up a small percentage of the available weapons, with the rest being mine-like area of effect explosions, autonomous helpers, a couple of shields, and a few proper oddballs like the slingshot. That last one generates a single large projectile behind your direction of motion for a few seconds before sending it flying forward, making it perfect to use like a battering ram for anything on your tail for the brief time it’s attached to the ship. Once everything is fully powered a final pair of mutators become available, one as part of the standard level-up process and another found as a pick-up, each of which boosts a weapon’s abilities in varying ways.
Review: Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors is a long slow burn that never stops getting hotter, maybe not quite the first of the genre it ignited, but certainly the best.
Between one twenty-minute run and the next you can spend the collected currency, used for buying different player ships and upgrading basic stats. Like the in-game weapon upgrades there’s nothing too involved in there, and it only takes a couple of purchases to be strong enough to survive to the end of the wave. That’s where the difficulty upgrade in the shop comes in to play, though, increasing the speed of the enemies for a faster, shinier light show. The heart of Geometry Survivor is just how incredibly satisfying it is to turn the screen into a mass of shattering vector particles, and that usually happens a second or two after being nearly overwhelmed by dense enemy patterns on the verge of blocking you in. Nails-tough difficulty has its place but it’s always nice to have an approachable challenge reward you with a light show.
Geometry Survivor released today on Steam Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, and PlayStations 4 and 5. It’s a cheap little thing whose main objective is to get the player to a pleasant state of visual near-overload, swarming the screen with enemies and shattering them into glowing particles almost as quickly. It’s a great little power trip, but speaking as someone who died three seconds before the end of the run the biggest enemy can be overconfidence.
