Mark my words; we’re about to be buried under a deluge of clones of Vampire Survivors. Right now, it’s already a drizzle, but it reached indie game escape velocity, and that means everyone will be trying to burn the same fuel.
Just look at Among Us. Certainly, it wasn’t the first social deduction game, but in the wake of its success, there was an explosion of them. Some of them are just blatant carbon copies.
Now, these two runaway successes are colliding in Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting. It is entirely just Vampire Survivors wearing some Among Us-skin boots.
I keep thinking that I have no experience with Among Us, but that’s not true. My nephew loves the game, so I’ve played it multiple times with my family. A game all about gaslighting each other is the perfect game to play with relatives. It also let me find out who my mother trusts more, between myself and my sister. Something to think about as I get flung out of the airlock again.
It’s more that I don’t have a connection with Among Us. As a reclusive misanthrope, I don’t play much multiplayer if I can help it. Then, when the merchandise started filling up department stores, my snobbery kicked in.
I do love Vampire Survivors, though. It’s a great source of dopamine and good music. Getting the DLC is sort of a foregone conclusion. It’s $2.49, which is less than I spent on breakfast.
For less than the price of breakfast, you get 9 new characters, 15 new weapons (I think it’s actually 16, but they might not be including mini-horse), 6 new tracks, a big new stage, and one of those fancy new adventures. It’s not a lot, but the price is easily worth it just for that music.
As I mentioned earlier, what Among Us brings to the equation is largely cosmetic. You won’t be rooting out the Impostor. You will still just be walking around while your assembled arsenal automatically obliterates everything that comes near. There are lots of references to the game, sometimes reaching way too deep, but this is still Vampire Survivors.
The references sometimes get a bit contrived here. One of the weapons, Lucky Swipe, is just a keycard moving back and forth. What’s worse is that it makes a really annoying sound, and it’s not the only new weapon that does so. It got so bad sometimes that I turned down the sound and raised the volume on the music so it would stop grating on my nerves.
Speaking of which, the new music is just fantastic. Easily some of the best in the entire game. I could listen to it on loop, which, considering a typical round of Vampire Survivors is 30 minutes, I usually am listening to it on loop. Perhaps a better compliment is that I will most likely be choosing it back in the main game.
The main issue I found with Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is that the weapons seem extremely overpowered. Throughout the Adventure Mode, I never fell short when it came to hitting the 30-minute mark. Even then, I’d usually be so buffed up that the Reaper that is supposed to end the round was unable to touch me. I would get up and walk away from the game, leaving my Crewmate standing idle, and it would take a good five-or-so minutes until the Reaper had enough friends to overpower me.
This is maybe less of a problem when you just play the main game with Emergency Meeting gear. It gets diluted within the multitude of weapons that are available to you. However, it still means that the Adventure Mode is complete cake. Adventure Mode is a new feature to the overall structure of Vampire Survivors to begin with, and neither of the previous DLCs even featured their own adventures, so the value of it, to begin with, will vary depending on what you expect from the game.
On top of that, it sometimes feels that Vampire Survivors is a game about becoming as overpowered as possible. So, complaining that an addition makes you more overpowered might be missing the point.
I considered making this a scored review, but figured the wasn’t much point. At its core, Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is a simple content pack based around another property. It’s not like Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania, where the marriage of design concepts creates a unique offshoot. This is Vampire Survivors in a t-shirt.
On the other hand, it’s not an insubstantial t-shirt. For the price of one wash cycle in your apartment’s laundromat, you get some great additional music tracks. The references are fun for people who have played Among Us, even if they lead to your speakers emitting sounds that are as pleasing to the ear as a sandpaper Q-tip. It’s a bit of a mixed bag overall, but if you’re a fan of either game, it’s maybe not worth ejecting into space.
