At some point, we’ve all been at a point where we are just minding our business, enjoying a new game, not a care in the world, and then it hits you like a ton of bricks. You just kind of check out mentally and your mind wanders, you soon realize that while there isn’t anything inherently wrong with what you’re playing, you would much rather be playing something else. My most recent experience with this was when playing the new single-stick shooter Hero Survival, where I couldn’t shake the desire to turn it off and revisit Vampire Survivors, which at the end of the day is an almost carbon copy of this new release.

Of course, there are a few differences, but none of them are for the better. If you’ve never played Poncle’s sleeper hit, the goal is simple: survive as long as possible in a unique take on the twin-stick shooter model in which you only have control of your character’s movement and they shoot on their own. It’s really one of the greatest values in gaming right now since there are a ton of characters, stages, and items to unlock on top of regular free and paid updates that just keep adding more and more content to an already meaty package.

And then we have Hero Survival. It gets the moment-to-moment gameplay down in a similar way, but everything else is extremely lacking. There are only four areas to play, a handful of characters that outside of being fun nods to historical or fictional characters, are essentially the same outside of their base stats. Opposed to each coming with their own unique attacks or weaponry, you have to unlock different starting weapons which can be mixed or matched between them, but it really took away from the excitement that normally would come from unlocking something new, as everything just felt like a chore thanks to the overly pricey upgrade tree. At a minimum I would’ve liked to see the characters have a character-specific item or weapon that enticed me to experiment more with the other characters, but once I unlocked the equivalent of Rambo, I’d give a new character a chance, be disappointed and go right back to my go-to avatar. Initially you collect gold at an increment of ten per coin picked up, with each upgrade costing well into the tens of thousands, meaning you’re going to likely be grinding for a few hours before getting that next purchase.

Each round plays out a little something like this – you pick your character, starting weapon, and level, you drop in and hopefully survive the increasingly long waves, culminating with a boss battle with a demon at the end of the tenth wave. It sounds simple enough, but there are a number of lingering issues here beyond the lack of content. First off, you face off with the same demon at the end of each area, which feels like a waste and left me wondering what the point was in terms of playing beyond the first mission. Then there is the upgrade system. In Vampire Survivors most of the fun is found in discovering all of the fun little secrets within the game, making your character as OP as possible, and essentially getting to the point where the game plays itself. Here, every upgrade you get you’re going to have to fight for and at the end of the day, it’s not really needed since the game is much, much easier if you’ve played any of the small pool of similar games or are familiar with building trains of zombies while playing any of the Call of Duty Nazi-zombie modes.

You’ll get perks upon leveling your character each time, which allow you to pick from one of three random options. It could be a permanent boost for the run, it could be something that allows you a temporary buff until you level again (gross), or allow you to recoup some lost health, which I would like to mention is seemingly the only way to do so. I personally found the temporary buffs to be a bit lackluster and contrary to the appeal of this niche genre. Acquiring weapons and items essentially plays out the same way, with this occurring at the end of each wave. The issue I had with this is that almost all of the items have more negative effects than positive ones, and in the off chance you luck out and get a new or upgraded gun, you can only see the stats of what you’re offered, not what you have equipped. If you elect to go with a new shiny gun to add to your arsenal, you can’t back out of it if you forgot that what you had was better than what you’re getting now. With the limitations being set at a max of four weapons, this can be detrimental to your progress.

I am normally a pro-vibration advocate and someone who feels weird if a game doesn’t offer some sort of rumble. It’s been a standard since my Nintendo 64 days and has continued long into being an adult. This is probably one of the few instances where I turned it off voluntarily due to the fact that there is only one type of rumble offered that’s triggered either when you pick up a coin or are hit, and the confusion caused by this would send me into a moment of panic at times, resulting in me getting hit for real when the last one had all been in my head.

At the end of the day, Hero Survival reminds me of all the times growing up when I’d ask my mom for McDonald’s on the way home and got that stereotypical response we all heard, “we have food at home.” In this instance, Vampire Survivors is the McDonald’s and Hero Survival is the ramen at home, but it’s from that discounted bulk pack that our family got because they forgot to include the flavor packets.

5 out of 10

Pros

• It’s Basically Vampire Survivors…

Cons

• Lacking in Content
• Upgrades Often Come Across as Downgrades
• Wonky Rumble Feature

Hero Survival was developed by PigeonDev and published by Meridian4 and Sometimes You. It launched on NS, PC, PS4, PS5, X1 and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on PS5. If you’d like to see more of Hero Survival, check out the Steam page.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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