Vampire Survivors

Vampire Survivors is apparently one of the first bullet heaven games. Where a bullet hell requires your character to dodge projectiles to win, this game features endless waves of enemies and your character is the one firing off the projectiles.

Fundamentally, the gameplay has three aspects to it: (1) moving your character around, (2) choosing which weapons/items to equip, and (3) choosing what to level up first. It's quite simple, really.

I spent 33 hours playing the game with my wife. Together, we defeated the final boss and unlocked a bunch of stuff, but we got bored and stopped playing before we unlocked everything.

THE GOOD:

• Hotseat multiplayer co-op!
• The game is pretty intuitive and it was easy to get started.
• The game was quite fun to play for a good 20 to 30 hours. At first, it wasn't clear how we'd ever defeat all the enemies to make it all the way to the end of a level. The waves get stronger and stronger and you just don't have enough damage output to stand any chance of surviving the full 30 minutes. We did eventually figure it out and it wasn't too hard.
• There's a bit of strategy involved in preparing weapon evolutions and opening chests at the right moment, but—really—winning is mainly about just playing long enough to unlock powerful power-ups rather than due to any significant skill or strategy.
• It was fun to figure out how to survive 31 minutes.
• There's a milk factory level. It features vats of milk.

THE BAD:

• The library level is fairly boring as there is little variety in its contents.
• A lot of the features of the game are pretty obscure and required us to look things up. This always runs the risk of encountering spoilers.
• The game does get pretty repetitive eventually. Playing for 45 minutes doing more-or-less the same thing for the hundredth time just to unlock one more character or power-up is just not that interesting. Given the large number of things to unlock, and hence the long expected play time, I think the developer could have done more to change things up and keep things interesting.
• I'm pretty sure this is a joke, but the game features no vampires. Isn't that sad?

THE UGLY:

• I didn't really encounter any serious bugs.
• Especially late in a level, all the flashing lights and explosions can be really overwhelming—even hypnotic.
• The knockback feature in the game can be quite frustrating, especially since enemies tend to ignore walls. If an enemy boss is very susceptible to knockback then they can be bouncing around all over the place and take forever to kill.