Warhammer Survivors is a reheated clone, but I’m still playing the $#!% out of it

At its mechanical core, Warhammer Survivors is a near-clone of 2021’s Vampire Survivors, set in the Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Age of Sigmar universes. Fans of the original bullet heaven game will find precious little new here, but the dopamine spewing special effects and meta-progression that made the original a 100 hour hit are as addictive as ever.

Publisher Auroch Digital provided me with a review key for Warhammer Survivors, but a board game review and a trip to Berlin meant I only started playing it yesterday. I thought I would have to delay this review to get enough playtesting time in – that was before the addictive gameplay loop got its teeth into me, and I logged twelve hours in two sittings.

If your gaming diet for the last five years has consisted solely of miniature wargames and perhaps the odd Warhammer 40k game on PC or console, you might have missed Vampire Survivors and the ‘bullet-heaven’ genre it spawned. The first half of this review describes the basic gameplay of the genre, but if you’re already familiar with it, skip ahead to where I talk about what’s different in Warhammer Survivors.

There isn’t much. Warhammer Survivors is so close to its inspiration that I can clue you in to the basic mechanics for both games in the same description. In fact, I’m not even going to refer to Warhammer for the next eight paragraphs.

How does Warhammer Survivors play? Like Vampire Survivors

You control a tiny pixellated dude in the middle of an unfeasibly huge map. Pixellated enemies spawn in continuously, and you’ll attack them automatically. The only thing you have to worry about is movement, skilfully navigating the ever-growing maze of mobs to preserve your health and get into position so each attack deals maximum damage.

Defeated enemies drop XP gems, which you need to physically collect. This adds a little bit of risk and reward, a need to balance your short term safety against your long term XP gain, as you dart around mobs that inevitably pile up on top of the treasure.

XP means level ups, and level-ups mean upgrades, giving you new weapons and passive support items or levelling up your existing kit. The enemies get stronger too, periodically spawning even tougher bosses who drop treasure chests full of more loot when they die. Carefully selecting synergistic upgrades is key to passing the ever-more-difficult DPS checks the game throws at you – but you’ll inevitably die, long short of the time limit for the level.

You’ll likely be holding a hoard of gold at this point, found in destructible environmental objects and inside treasure chests. Between runs you can spend this cash on upgrades to your stats or to unlock new characters once you discover them in maps or by achieving certain milestones. Then you go again, and hopefully hang on a little longer.

That’s a simple but already compelling core. The auto-attack system isn’t mindless, as every weapon has its own finicky positioning or targeting controls: weapons that attack horizontally can’t reach enemies above or below you, weapons that attack the closest foe struggle to focus-fire single targets in mobs, powerful attacks on long cool-downs need support from smaller weapons to clear paths for you to move through when the screen inevitably fills up before they can fire again.

The game is also rife with secrets. Kill a boss while holding a level 10 weapon and the correct support item, and its treasure chest will contain an evolved form of that weapon. These have higher damage output you never thought possible and explosive special FX. Every weapon has a unique combo piece to discover, and they’re not always synergistic, pushing your builds into strange directions as you chase the evolved weapons you need to make it to the end of a run.

With a powerful enough build you’ll make it to the final five minutes of the level and a casino of vibrant FX, numbers, dings, and other feedback. Getting to this hyperactive final phase reveals the pixel art as not just an aesthetic choice, but what allows a regular games console or mid-range PC to render this many objects on screen.

Make it all the way to the end of the level and you’ll face off against an extreme mega-boss who is initially unkillable. Of course there’s a secret way to bring them down, you’ve just got to find out. At the end of a good run you’ll be faced with a cascade of trophies and tick-boxes as you discover all the ‘firsts’ you achieved, which in turn unlock new items, new characters to purchase, new levels, faster play modes, more secrets…

So it was written in Vampire Survivors, so it is in Warhammer Survivors. I don’t use the term “clone” lightly, but mechanically this is extremely close to the same game. The setting is different, and what mechanical differences exist between the two games stem from the setting – and the choice for that to be two settings.

Two games in one

Warhammer Survivors has two modes, Warhammer 40k and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. Though mechanically identical, each has a distinct roster of characters, distinct levels, distinct enemies, distinct weapons, distinct achievements and unlocks. The only thing persistent between them is the gold you earn in levels and whichever global stat boosts you spend it on – otherwise, they’re two separate games.

This occasionally feels like an artificial separation. Support items, and a class of fourth-wall breaking weapons that includes pots of Nuln Oil paint or hurtling D6s, are shared between the two games, but achievements connected to those items aren’t. There are a lot of unlocks that rely on getting an item to level six in a run, and you’ll need to do that in both games to make the same progress. It’s busywork.

Still, swapping from one world to the other is quite refreshing. The game has two weapon pools tailored to two enemy sets, two different levels, and if you get frustrated in one mode you can hop into the other. I’ve yet to unlock it, but there’s also a painting desk map which breaks the fourth wall entirely, acknowledges that these warriors are all toy soldiers, and allows enemies from both universes to freely mix and match.

A small but substantive mechanical difference from Vampire Survivors comes from the inclusion of Followers. Not every weapon you can find can be used by every character, but this doesn’t remove them from the item pool. Collecting them sees your character joined by another hero, maybe a Space Marine, or Sister of Battle or Stormcast Eternal, to wield the weapon in an IP-approved manner.

This second sprite doesn’t take damage but does become the point of origin for the weapon, which creates subtle new tactical possibilities. Sister Superior Amelia Novena projects a damaging Aura of Faith. Playing as her puts you dead center of a zone that fries weak enemies; when you get a Sister of Battle follower she and the aura trail behind your character. You’re more vulnerable to enemies in your path, but if you’re skirting the edges of a mob you can get the aura deeper into the press.

The developers also use your follower count as a new tool for differentiating characters and weapons. The Cadian Trooper Bartosz Kozlowski gets a boost to their experience gain rate the more followers are with them, while the Witch Hunter Callis gets additional attacks when he has exactly one follower, a nod to the fact he’s usually paired up with his buddy Toll in novels and on the tabletop. Fielding a party containing both of them even unlocks a cosmetic for the pair.

For all that Warhammer Survivors is little more than a clone, I can’t call that a damning criticism. I really liked Vampire Survivors. I am an absolute rube for this kind of dopamine-spaffing fireworks factory.

If you played Vampire Survivors, you want to do it all over again from the beginning without resetting your account, and you like Warhammer, you’ll enjoy this. If you’re new to the bullet heaven genre and you like Warhammer, this is an easy recommend – just remember to come up for air from time to time.

Playing Warhammer Survivors has me fiending for some recommendations for more modern bullet heaven games that push the genre forwards. If you’ve got any, I’d love to hear them in the Wargamer Discord community.

Source: Wargamer