Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns is better value than a laundromat wash cycle

It’s finally here, the Konami/Poncle crossover everyone dreamed of the moment they first picked up Vampire Survivors. Contra has finally arrived to mow down waves and waves of identical enemies.

Vampire Survivors just didn’t feel complete without Bill Rizer and Lance Whosits. And there is no game that can’t be made better with the inclusion of guns. Just go back and ask 8-year-old Zoey, she’d definitely tell you Mario would be better with a gun. Vampire Survivors already had guns, but its arsenal was missing one thing: lots of guns.

Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns is here to salve those gaping, festering wounds and finally deliver to us the game we’ve always thirsted for.

Similar to the last DLC, which crossed it over with Among Us, Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns contains a new “one big map,” an adventure to add to the growing list, and a tonne of new unlocks. Operation Guns brings the heat with 22-ish new weapons, and 11-ish new characters from across the Contra series. There’s also an extra-special level that includes hoverbikes.

Poncle named the laser weapon upgrade the “C.U. Laser” and now that’s what I’m going to call it in Contra. Thanks a lot!

Most importantly (maybe) is that new music tracks have arrived to drill their way into your ears. There are six remixes and 13 new tracks. I have the Hard Corps remix stuck in my head right now. It won’t stop!

Personally, I’ve always put Contra on a much higher pedestal than Among Us. That’s probably because I’m old, don’t have any friends, and remember the good old days. However, as with the Emergency Meeting DLC, Operation Guns doesn’t really add much of Contra’s DNA into the mix. It’s still Vampire Survivors in a Contra T-Shirt.

Despite that, the references are very well interwoven. The “one big map” stretches from a jungle, to a ruined city, to an alien hive. There’s even a familiar boss that pops up in there. It bops to the music! I don’t know why it dances or whose decision it was to make it dance, but it is easily the best thing ever.

A number of the guns still behave as they do in the classic run-’n-gun shooter series: the spreader spreads, the C.U. Laser penetrates deep into enemy skulls. New to Operation Guns is an item specifically for evolving Contra weapons. While you sometimes still need a passive power-up to evolve Contra guns, they also require the Weapon Power-Up item, which doesn’t take a spot from your subweapons, but is a pretty finite resource. Mostly, they’re just found on maps. And they weren’t added to non-Contra maps.

Which is strange to the point where I think I’m missing something. I wouldn’t believe that you just can’t upgrade the Operation Guns guns on normal maps. That would make all the new weapons feel like needless clutter in an already bloated selection.

I don’t feel like the new weapons are as overpowered as some of the ones I found in Emergency Meeting. But, as I said there, I think part of the appeal of Vampire Survivors is becoming so overpowered that it starts to feel like the game is about to break.

However, as with Emergency Meeting, I never hit the point in Adventure Mode where I felt like I was going to lose. I always hit the endpoint of a level, but having clocked so many hours into Vampire Survivors already, I’ve already built skills to pay the bills.

So, it’s kind of hard to rate Operation Guns, which is why I’m not doing that. It’s another part of the growing, grotesquely mutating mass of Vampire Survivors. If you’re already in love with that mass, then you’re probably going to want to shovel more into it. And at $2.50, Poncle still remains hilariously bad at taking your money. If you think Vampire Survivors would be better if you could spend hours looking at Brad Fang’s hairy, shirtless torso (and why wouldn’t you?) then the question of whether or not you should purchase Operation Guns should be obvious.

Hopefully, this won’t be the last Konami crossover we see. There are many other great licenses that could be a great fit in the overstuffed bag of Vampire Survivors. For example, Rocket Knight Adventures. For another example, Ganbare Goemon. Those are all the Konami games I can think of.