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It’s a familiar loop, but no less compulsive for it. Fortunately, there are meta-upgrades you can buy between each run to expand your vocabulary, granting you increased health, damage, move speed, XP rates and more that let you start off a little stronger. It’s the first of several milestones where Vampire Survivors says, "Oh, you thought you were on top of things, did you?" and at first your only reply will be death. The complacent will get their comeuppance, primarily in the form of a sea of skeletons that spawn in at around 11 minutes. Lean into that kind of thinking and you can fall right in. Sometimes it’s like I’m looking at moving planetary bodies, spiralling around an orbit I’m both designing and in danger of succumbing to. It’s a tactic that affords me long stretches where I can let my brain go squishy, letting my vision swap between the minutia and the mass, like a magic eye picture made from monster flesh. For me, that means patrolling in a big circle, spinning up a ball of monsters for my weapons to chip away at.
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When enemies drop XP gems they don’t disappear, so there’s no need to immediately dart in and grab them, but it still makes sense to coax the horde into dropping them where they’re convenient. Individuals get subsumed into the horde, and your mindset shifts from hit and run tactics into something that more closely resembles herding.
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Within minutes, though, that way of seeing becomes untenable. You don’t control how or when your weapons fire, but you can still shuffle about to maximize their impact. Specific hazards to manoeuvre around, where each can be mentally assigned a dagger or a razor-boomerang. You’ll perceive those early bats and ghouls as individual threats, at first. This is a game that understands how to escalate. There is glee to be had in transforming a lowly fire wand into an artifact of meteoric, path-clearing destruction. Vampires who want to survive the longest should start off by focusing on upgrading as small a pool of weapons as possible, because the later tiers compound the benefits you get from earlier ones - especially if you manage to evolve a weapon by pairing it with a specific bit of gear. Notable power increases come swiftly, with each level-up offering you a choice between three or four upgrades. It feels generous long before it becomes overwhelming. If you survive for 30 minutes, death itself comes along and insta-kills you, which means you win. It doesn’t matter too much, because within five minutes those buffs will be submerged under the sweet, sweet boons of a dozen or more level-ups. Maybe you’ll spew fireballs and have a shorter weapon cooldown time, or blast lightning while enjoying slightly increased AOE. You begin each run as one of seven unlockable vampires, each with their own starting weapon and ability. There’s a bit more to it than that, but not much.