Also available on: PS4/PS5, Xbox One, Switch – Out Now

Vampire Survivors is a game that I couldn’t put down.

Day after day, night after night, the relentless, Pavlovian pinging of upgrades and rewards was just too addictive and compelling to stay away from.

Hero Survival aims for a similar play experience, albeit one that’s more pop culture savvy and certainly, in many ways, built with a more consistent approach to its lore and aesthetic than the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach of Vampire Survivors.

In Hero Survival, your character is pitted against classic monsters, from folklore and fiction.

You wander around a reasonably sized arena, dodging the relentless onslaught of enemies as your weapons auto fire at them.

It’s incredibly easy to pick up and play – and, on the surface at least, pretty intuitive. Though it has a plot, it scarcely matters; the compulsion to keep going and better your progress on each run of this roguelite shooter comes from the satisfaction of blasting beasties to kingdom come, rather than any need to see where the story goes next.

Vampire Survivors could be incredibly obtuse with its mechanics and rewards, necessitating many trips to online Wiki pages; Hero Survival fares better in this regard with more transparent stats, but can also be a bit baffling with some of the effects on your character – what on earth does Intellect matter, for example? Good luck working it out without consulting a guide!

That said, most other stats, bonuses and penalties are pretty self explanatory – and it has a great system of applying weapons to different slots around your character.

Enormous bosses are also a bit easier to deal with than those found in Vampire Survivors, as you can see how much HP they have left.

Often, I’ve found myself dying in Hero Survival due to my own greed of trying to pick up too many coins at a time (which allow you to unlock new characters and other permanent perks), rather than the game being at fault – it plays nicely and also, it plays fair too.

Though it cannot possibly hope to match the ridiculously enormous arenas in Vampire Survivors, it’s still a shame that the stages in Hero Survival feel quite cramped and small.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re not tiny – but you can often find yourself trapped in a corner in a way that rarely happens in, yes, that other game that keeps being mentioned here.

Still, there’s no denying that Hero Survival has bags of charm and, while it doesn’t quite have that endless dopamine rush of pings and lights that Vampire Survivors had, in the course of playing it to write this review I found it very difficult to step away from.

So if you enjoyed the top down, bullet hell style action of Vampire Survivors – in which, let’s face it, you were the one raising said hell – you’ll undoubtedly have a blast with Hero Survival.

It is a very different experience in many ways to the game that seems to have been the biggest influence on it – and it definitely has its own chunky, pixelated charm that’ll have you coming back again and again.

Many thanks to the publisher for providing a code for Hero Survival for review purposes.