A Vampire Survivor Clone That Keeps The Fangs | Night Swarm Review

Like many that have come before it, Vampire Survivor has started the recent popularization of horde survivors. With so many games copying the massively successful formula, let’s see if the game I’m reviewing today is a beautiful evolution of the subgenre, or another game pushed out to follow the trend. 

Night Swarm is a Vampire Survivor clone that keeps the fangs in tack. Embody a vampire who is fighting for his right to sit on his throne as his fellow vampires try to kill him. The story is there, running alongside the runs of this roguelike, seeming to imitate the feeling of Hades. Explore the castle you live in to find several mechanics to use and upgrade, and then drop into a run of monster-infested torment. Let’s dive in and see if this copy is brilliant or lackluster.

The Runs

When you start a run, you enter a map showing the whole kingdom that you will need to conquer to earn your birthright, the throne, power, and control over the lands. Four regions break down into three zones with three difficulties. That means, if you want to play through everything, you will need to win 36 battles. This might not sound like a lot, but when you toss in the fact that this is a roguelite with 10 stages to play through each time, you realize how long this task will truly take. 

The basic battling stage will last roughly three minutes, and you may or may not have an objective. In that time, hordes of monsters will swarm you. Luckily, you slowly build up four powers to defend yourself. Each ability you gain can level up to 10, and certain pairings have evolutions to combine and increase the damage. And since the options are random, you can mix and match until you find combinations that feel right for your play style. 

Outside of the basic stage, there are several others that you will want to keep an eye out for. With branching paths, you will want to take a look ahead. There are Companion stages that allow you to trade the blood of your enemies for an ally that will accompany you for the rest of the run. Resources will show up in the form of crystals, silks, and tokens; these will have you attack a target or complete a mini fetch quest to gain materials used in upgrading. I highly suggest aiming for the question mark and campfire stages. The question marks will give prompts, and you can earn materials and levels for free. The campfires will return all missing health. Once you’ve cleared nine stages, you have the zone’s boss. Each boss has their own set of attacks and spawns minions to assist them in the brawl. 

If you live to see the next day, you can choose to go into an endless mode to gather more materials or go back to the castle to level up mechanics. Neither is a better answer, so choose whichever you’re feeling in the moment. 

The Unlocks

There are roughly six materials that you will be collecting for upgrades in the castle. This makes it feel like a run that ends too early isn’t a waste because you can still upgrade something when you come back home. The buffs you gain from the castle feel impactful and are needed to go against the higher-level difficulties.

For most upgrades, you will need to perform certain actions in a run. For most of the attacks and buffs, those will be unlocked through specific criteria. Runes will drop from monsters or high-value totems. All clothing items are gained through drops in a run and can only be upgraded in the castle. 

The companions are a major benefit and have become a necessity in later runs. You start with a few unlocked, and you need to make a deal with the rest to join the roster. Each companion has a unique buff ranging from damage increase, cooldown reduction, or pick-up range increase. They will activate the ability when their mana is fully regenerated. This is something you can level to make the ability stronger, as well as a passive ability. This is the most powerful stage and buff in the whole game. My must-haves in the early game were the damage buff, movement speed, and crit damage. Now that I’ve entered the late game, I always go for the health regen and cooldown reduction. These two things allow me to go through hordes of enemies, and even if I take a good amount of damage, I can still go into the boss fight and not worry about being one hit.

There is a skill tree that allows you to increase health, deal more damage, and get items that let you reroll ability cards. The skill tree was good, but I wish there were more. The roadmap does say they will be adding more in the future, but after I maxed it, at least I could use the gems to level my runes. I started with the damage increases because I thought it was well worth it. Then I moved to the health. I had no idea that one of the best things was lurking there. There were two compounding death defiances! Revive after death with 40% health could be activated twice. Now, you still only revive once, but now, you get 80% of your health back! This can make a run that was previously impossible due to low health.

I will say, I love how once I was done with the skill tree, I could still use the materials. I cannot say the same things once you finish building out the furnishings for the castle. I now have thousands of pieces and nothing to do with them.

I enjoyed my time early on upgrading, but there is a breakpoint where everything just takes so many resources that it was so slow to collect. And with that said, let’s move on to the problem section

The Problems

The first issue I have is that Night Swarm does not feel like it respects your time. With 36 attempts minimum, you are looking at too many hours doing the same thing. I wouldn’t have much of an issue if the game had more variety. There are four regions: forest, desert, icy tundra, and another castle. You have to go through each of these regions nine times since you have to beat normal mode to unlock nightmare mode, and nightmare mode to unlock hell mode. This feels like a waste of time and put in to bloat the gameplay time. There is no reason hell mode couldn’t have been unlocked from the start, and count for beating the lower difficulties too. Other games allow players the freedom to choose the challenge level they feel fits their skills. Night Swarn bottle feeds you a slowly increasing difficulty copy and pastes into the same exact environment in each zone. Once you’ve played the first stage of each region, you know what you will see for the next five hours. The forest is bare basic; nothing in the environment can harm you, you only have to look out for the monsters. The desert has a giant sandworm and dust tornadoes, which are frankly just annoying, especially when you are getting swarmed and can’t move; it feels a tad unfair. The icy tundra has the only interesting mechanic of spreading out fire pits that you have to find in order to keep from freezing and slowing to a crawl. And sadly, you would think the castle level would have an even better mechanic since it’s the final area, but no. It just has a bunch of boobytraps that are incredibly simple to avoid. This is boring since you have to go through 10 stages of the same thing, and nothing new is in the distance waiting to pull you in; each failed run feels like a huge waste of time. 

My second issue is my vision. There is a lot that starts to happen on screen in hell mode. You get some good upgrades, combine two abilities, and suddenly, you can’t see the floor. This isn’t a huge issue in the main stages, but it becomes a major problem when you make it to the boss fight. The bosses mark the upcoming attacks with purple shadows that appear on the floor. And guess what you can’t do when your screen is full of bright blue and red? Yeah, that’s right. You can’t see the incoming attack! This is a huge problem that cost me two runs and made me hate merging abilities; it felt more like a huge hindrance than a power-up. 

The next one had me thinking I needed to upgrade my PC, and that’s the stuttering. I had to look at the Steam reviews to see if it was just me or a game thing. And turns out, it’s a game thing. The game seems to overload itself when the screen is filled, leading to some stuttering and freezing. This, most of the time, doesn’t negatively affect you, but there are a few times when you take unnecessary hits because of it. A bonus issue that didn’t happen to me, but happened to others, was that certain unlockables were not opening, even after the criteria were completed, so that would seem really annoying to deal with. 

And let’s wrap up this section with something that I didn’t find out until a comment pointed it out to me. There is gen AI used in this game. The music, the characters, and the environment are all safe, human-made. But, they just couldn’t stay the course; they sold out to AI for the voices. The odd thing that threw me off when playing was that some characters sound like they are legitimately voice-acted, while others felt more like text-to-speech was used. The range of quality felt awkward to me, and then I found out that all of it was done with AI in what I assume was the desire to fulfill the mood the devs wanted to set. I would have just preferred to have the characters be mute. This game was already starting to take a turn for the boring while making my way towards 100% completion, and learning that I was playing a game with AI voice acting made me feel gross. I still want to power through the game, and I didn’t spend any money on it, so at least I didn’t monetarily support this, but I do feel the need to emphasize that AI was used in this game. 

Verdict

Taking a step back, there are a lot of negatives mentioned in this video. And that’s kinda expected from a game that lacks diversity in the level designs, and I already have over 30 hours in it. You start to notice things a new player wouldn’t. It got so repetitive that I had to swap to playing it on my Steam Deck (derogatory) in order to get runs in. I would get halfway through a run, lose interest, pause the game, and come back later. 

I would like to point out, these negatives come after hours and hours of grinding this game over a short amount of time. When I started, I really enjoyed the game. It is technically the first Horde Survivor game that I have really played outside a demo or playtest. The novelty was still at work and unlocking mechanics, and upgrades were pushing me to play more rounds and see how powerful I could get. The issues didn’t start popping up until I ran out of those dopamine-giving moments of upgrading or finding something new. I maxed the skill tree, built all the furniture, leveled the companions I liked, and found all the bloodgiven abilities. What more was there for me to look forward to? The point I’m trying to make is that this game survives and dies by the upgrades. Starting a new run felt slow after you come off the high of being this overpowered man who could challenge gods. And gathering tons of materials you can’t use anymore feels worthless. The only thing pushing me forward is knowing I just need to finish the castle to pop the rest of my achievements. 

I think this game is hard to recommend, and that is because of the use of AI, the wall you hit after you upgrade everything, and the lack of change-ups to keep players interested makes it a hard sell when you can go and get Vampire Survivor for like five bucks. I guess if you are a horde survivor addict, maybe check this game out, but I think I can’t give this game anything higher than a 3.5/5.