Survivor-like games or "bullet-heaven" games have become hugely popular since Vampire Survivors released at the end of 2021. The simple, highly addictive gameplay loop is something that just keeps players constantly wanting more. Trying to beat the boss at 10 minutes, trying to beat the map by surviving 30 minutes and trying to unlock everything character/zone in the game never stopped being fun, because every time you went into a new run, you felt that you were stronger because of the upgrades and/or constant unlocks of new characters.

This is where Spellbound Survivor comes into play and adds... one thing to change the formula. The developers play it extremely safe and by even copying most of the weapons from Vampire Survivors, and it's all really fun, but after a few hours of playtime, you start to see how much work the game still needs.

Let us focus on the good things first. The presentation is really good, the clean pixel graphics really fit this genre of games and in this case it's even better since some of the weapon animations look incredibly clean and satisfying to look at. The music is also really good, every stage has its own music, but the little con I have is that the music loops too fast. It's around 45 seconds per loop so in a game where you're usually going for around 10 minutes, even 30 minutes if you're beating the map and hearing that same loop constantly, it really gets annoying. The one thing that the game adds to the bullet-heaven formula is a "legend bar" which fills up the more enemies you kill and then when the bar is filled it unleashes a character specific "ultimate move" that kills everything on screen.

Now let's go into the cons of the game, and oh boy does it have them. After around 5 hours of playtime I realized that if I wanna get anywhere in this game and not get constantly killed at 11 minutes on any map, I need to grind gold to buy permanent upgrades, and you might be thinking that you do that in any bullet-heaven game anyways. Yes, you do, but in a way where it doesn't take away from the actual gameplay of killing thousands of enemies and bosses and getting gold that way. In this game, if you wanna grind gold, you ignore ALL the enemies and constantly run in a pattern you think is best to find green crystals and destroy them with 1-2 hits to get a SMALL chance to get a pouch of 50 gold or a single coin. Usually in my grind runs I would get around 400 gold, which is enough for a single third tier upgrade, which still doesn't help you get that much stronger because tier 3 upgrades are basically having 7.5% more damage, getting 30% more coins etc.

You might be asking yourself why not just kill bosses and grind gold like that. Well, the bosses are huge bullet sponges that don't even show HP. So after all the upgrading I did, after 8 hours of playtime, I managed to kill the 5 minute boss ONCE, and it rewarded me with around 100 gold, and it took me around 5 minutes of focusing all my weapons on him. Now tell me is it better to run around the map, ignore the enemies and grind 400 gold in 10 minutes, or grind experience for 5 minutes to MAYBE get strong enough to beat the boss, and then constantly circling around him for 5 minutes to get 100 gold.

Also, the achievements in this game are hit or miss. You have the usual ones like survive 10 mins on a certain map, kill a certain amount of enemies and get a certain weapon to max level. But some are just a cheap way to get people to play when they just don't want to. Play the game for 50 hours. That's an achievement. Vampire Survivors has way more content then this and it's way more fun, and I unlocked everything in around 45 hours.

I understand this game is not even out yet and it's in a beta phase but I feel like if they don't change how the gameplay loop works people just won't like the game. Make us earn more gold, make the bosses easier, remove unnecessary achievements and just overall make the game fun.

4/10