#65 - Vampire Hunters

Surprise early review! I usually spend all night writing these (because I'm a night owl) and then post it first thing in the morning before I go to bed. But I wound up with a free day and nothing to do, so I decided to write a review this afternoon.

Vampire Hunters is essentially Vampire Survivors, except instead of an 8-bit top-down survival game, you're now in the middle of the action with a 32-bit FPS view! The developers even admitted this game was designed to be a mix between old-school FPS games and the innovative gameplay from Vampire Survivors.

No, they did not make that previous game. Gamecraft Studios made Vampire Hunters; whereas poncle made Vampire Survivors.

Like its predecessor, Vampire Hunters is a survival game, where you fight an infinitely growing number of monsters who are all slowly shambling toward you. Unlike its predecessor though, there is a time limit to pass each level. You need to survive for 30 minutes before you can escape the level.

Technically, you can stay as long as you want and continue fighting enemies indefinitely, but enemies will get significantly harder until you're overwhelmed. So having an escape is a nice change.

You start by picking your character. There are six characters to play, but only three are unlocked right away. You need to meet certain criteria to unlock the rest. Each character has different stats, so pick something that aligns with your play style. I chose the Paladin because I felt her weakness was easier for me to manage than the other two.

There is only one stage to play starting out - Brotherhood Chateau - so you can jump right in at this point. The game has eight main stages and three bonus stages. As you make progress, you'll unlock more stages to play.

The gameplay starts out real simple. You have one weapon that your character starts with, and you take out cultists as they spawn from portals within iron maidens scattered around the castle. There is no firing required; like Vampire Survivors, your weapons auto-fire as you point at enemies. When they die, most of them will drop a soul (that blue hovering dot) that you can pick up.

Collect a few of these and you'll get a full-screen menu pop up with four random options to pick from. Mostly weapons to acquire (or upgrade a current weapon), but sometimes you'll get a relic that will boost your stats in a specific way.

You can carry up to ten primary weapons, two passive items that will either damage enemies or buff you, and two secondary weapons for close-up combat. Which are a real life-saver when you get into a tight corner with enemies in your face.

And yes, you use all weapons simultaneously. So the bottom of your screen will slowly fill up with weapons as you acquire more. How many hands do you have?!

I don't know if it's strictly a Paladin ability (I haven't played any other characters yet), but I can do a stomp on the ground if I hit Shift while in the air. This blows back enemies and damages them, which is excellent for clearing a space when I'm getting overwhelmed.

There's also a Blood Skill you can use by pressing F when the red orb in the bottom center of the screen fills up. There's not much information about it in the game, except that it does some sort of attack or ability for a few seconds, so I keep forgetting it's there.

Every once in a while, a boss will spawn with a life bar across the top of the screen. They can be a nuisance, but generally aren't that bad to deal with as long as you keep moving and don't neglect waves of monsters for them.

They get really annoying when you're overwhelmed with hundreds of monsters and four bosses spawn all at the same time.

Fortunately, you can see all enemies through walls, so you're never surprised going around a corner. Bosses show up red when looking at them through walls, so you can quickly identify them from across the map.

When you inevitably die (or finish the stage), you can go back to the main menu and upgrade your character. There's a Skill Tree, where you can upgrade specific attributes or unlock/upgrade artifacts by spending the Reputation Level points or Boss Tokens that you earned from each stage.

If you've unlocked any artifacts, you can equip up to three of them on the main menu.

There are also Permanent Upgrades, which boost your character's stats in specific categories. You spend Upgrade Coins to boost each of these stats, which you also earn by playing each level.

When you meet certain criteria, you might unlock a constellation, which you can then equip for added benefits. You can only have one constellation equipped at a time, and they give you a positive and a negative effect, so choose them wisely.

Finally, you can select your main weapon to start with. The three main characters' weapons are unlocked right away, but you can unlock any others you've come across in your gameplay by spending Boss Tokens.

Running all over the levels can get you swarmed on all sides if you're not careful, so I like to plant myself on a ramp or platform with only one entrance, then pick off enemies as they come up to me. I stay until I'm completely overwhelmed, run to the other side of the map to clear the area, then go back to start again. That strategy seems to work pretty well for me when I'm just trying to run out the clock.

There are treasure chests that randomly spawn throughout the level. They'll appear as a gold chest icon in the world (See lower left corner of last screenshot). They bring up the full-screen menu with four optional weapons/relics/etc. to add or upgrade.

When you take down a boss, they'll drop a red chest, which will give you a buff to a particular stat for that round. All chests only last for a limited time, so fight your way to them as soon as you see their icon in the world! Or miss out on easy upgrades.

Each stage has different requirements for ending the stage after the 30-minute mark. I've beaten three stages so far: the Brotherhood Chateau requires that you approach each iron maiden portal and manually close it. The Corrupted Necropolis (Egyptian tomb-themed stage) requires that you slowly summon two ankh's on either end of the stage, then place them over the hands of the giant statue in the center of the stage.

In the Village Yard, you just need to get to a hot-air balloon and escape to the skies.

So if you enjoy fighting endless waves of enemies and surviving as long as possible, check out this game! It was a lot of fun. There are leaderboards for each stage, showing global rankings and points earned. My highest rank in any stage was 1,691st place, as seen below:

If I'm brave enough to stick around past the 30-minute mark and keep mowing down monsters, maybe I can get my ranking below the 4-digit mark. I've easily spent several entire evenings playing this game; it's pretty addicting. Now I need to go check out the fourth stage (Yuki Vale) and see what that's all about. Looks like it's Japanese-themed.

#64 - Enshrouded (Revisted)

Welcome back! Today we're going to be doing an in-depth look at the first game I ever posted here: Enshrouded. Now that I do long-form blog discussions instead of just screenshot posts, I figured it was time to revisit this game and give it a solid overview.

This is the third most-played game in my Steam library, which says a lot considering I have over 4,000 games. My friends and I have put about 532 hours into this game so far.

Enshrouded has been in early access for about a year and a half and the developers are still actively working on it. I'm kind of glad I waited until now to give it a full review because it's received tons of new content in the past year, and it's only getting better.

Enshrouded is unique in that it's a third-person open-world fantasy game, but it's also a crafting/survival game where you can dig/mine anywhere there is terrain and destroy almost everything placed in the world.

You can travel the world, discovering new quests and lore and improving your weapons, armor, and skills. Or, you can pick a place to settle down and build your own fantasy home, literally from the ground up. By the current endgame, you can have up to ten city-wide bases established anywhere in the world, where you can build to your heart's content.

You can also host your own public or private server and invite up to 16 people to quest in your custom world. You can fine-tune the settings of your server, so players or NPCs are stronger or weaker, determine how quickly weapons and tools break (or set them to never break), adjust how long daylight and nighttime is, and a ton more detailed customizations. Not needing food and water to survive is a default setting, although you can turn it on if you want the true survival feeling. You can also lock down your builds so strangers joining your game can't just destroy your cities and loot your resources.

I just started a new character to get screenshots for this post and I was surprised to see an opening cutscene explaining the lore of the game! That's a new addition.

Long ago, a stranger traveled to the lands of Embervale and presented the humans and Ancients with "The Elixir," a potent drug that boosted one's natural abilities. It was highly addicting and humans, of course, went a little nuts over this miracle drug, attempting to harvest their own elixir straight out of the earth themselves.

But like the Mines of Moria, humans delved too greedily and too deep, and they awoke The Shroud - a terrible fog that poisons the land and turns people into a sort of mindless undead creature called The Fell.

As The Shroud overtook the lands, humans and the Ancients worked together to create "The Flameborn," a type of person attuned to the power of fire, who is more resistant to The Shroud. This is your character.

It's never really explained, but Flameborn are essentially immortal. If you die, you just respawn from the last Flame Altar or Return Beacon you visited, so you can't ever truly have a game over. Also, you're resistant to fire.

By the way, if you find vials of the elixir in-game, it'll give a 30-minute buff of 30% damage increase and let you stay in The Shroud for up to a minute longer while it's active.

After you've built your custom Flameborn character, the game opens with you awakening within a Cinder Vessel. You climb out to find yourself in a long-forgotten Ancient Vault. Society has basically collapsed long ago and despite some scattered "Scavengers" (humans driven mad by elixir consumption) who roam the lands, there's no sign of people.

Traveling through the halls of the vault, you find a Flame Shrine, which ignites in your presence. (All sources of light in the world - even extinguished flames - will automatically flare up when you approach them.) The flame whispers to you, urging you to create a Flame Altar in the world to shelter yourself from the dark. The vault doors open, allowing you to explore the ruins of the world.

You step out onto a crumbling and overgrown terrace, where you get your first glance at the outside world and its various ruins. There are weather events in this game and it happened to be overcast at this point of my gameplay, but you'll see random sunny days and rainy days as well. Even snowfall if you're high enough up in the mountains!

The plains below are marked with a tall red flame, showing the general area for you to build your first Flame Altar. But to get there, you have to travel through a Shroud-filled cavern down the mountain.

This is your first experience in dealing with The Shroud. When you step into it, a timer bar appears at the top of the screen, counting down to your end if you don't escape The Shroud. You start with about 5 minutes of time, but as you strengthen the flame at your Flame Altar, you'll improve the amount of time you can spend in The Shroud.

When you make it to the plains, you'll need to pull up your crafting menu to make a Flame Altar. Make sure you have the proper materials to make it! In this case, you need 5 stones, which you can literally pick up off the ground.

Once you have made your Flame Altar, you need to place it in the world. See the faint yellow square around the borders of the plains? That designates the build area near the Flame Altar. Anywhere within that square, you can build whatever you want. As you level up your Flame Altar, that square will get exponentially larger, until you have space for a small city!

It's actually a cube space; you also have a limit to how high and how low you can build from that shrine. But as with the sides, that space will grow as you level up the Flame Altar. You can eventually build a massive tower to the heavens! Or a dungeon deep into hell...

Put multiple Flame Altars within range of each other to expand a single base's build region, or place them randomly around the world. Flame Altars are not only build areas, but also fast-travel points, so scattering them in hard-to-reach areas saves you on travel time around the massive map.

Remember that you can only place two Flame Altars when you start the game, so don't make a bunch of them. As you strengthen the flame at your Flame Altar, you will be able to use more. Ten is the current max number of Flame Altars you can have in the world, so place them wisely. You can always deactivate them and re-place them somewhere else, but anything you've built in their region will eventually disappear if you walk away for 30 minutes.

The flame at your new Flame Altar whispers to you, telling you to seek out more survivors who are slumbering in other nearby Ancient Vaults. At this point, you can either dedicate your time to crafting a base, or going out to find other survivors in the world. I chose to track down the first survivor - a blacksmith.

There are currently nine craftspeople, five assistants to the craftspeople, and ten villagers to find in the world. The craftspeople have specialized skills that will expand your crafting capabilities, the assistants have duplicate skills of specific craftspeople, so you can have two people with the same crafting skills scattered around your base, and the villagers are just NPCs to make your bases look more lived in.

Now that I have a blacksmith, I need a shelter for him. I guess I should at least build a house. You need to craft a workbench first, which will give you more advanced crafting abilities than what you can access from your crafting menu.

Once you've placed a workbench, accessing its menu will give you blocks of building materials you can craft. As you discover new materials in the world, this menu will expand with new types of building blocks.

I know the numbers don't add up - 100 stone blocks from 2 stones?! But hey, if I have to mine 100 stones to craft 100 stone blocks, I'll be mining all day! And 100 blocks don't go very far when building. So I'm glad I can craft more materials with limited resources. It keeps the gameplay moving forward without bogging you down with (excessively) repetitive tasks.

Once you have blocks crafted, ensure you have a construction hammer on your toolbar. (You can craft one from your crafting menu or from the workbench menu). Switch to your construction hammer, open the building mode (Tab button on PC), then select the shape and material you want to construct.

You can lay one individual brick at a time, or select a custom shape to build a platform, wall, giant block, ramp, roof, etc. If you have dirt or stones in your inventory, you can also create various shapes and sizes of terrain and edit the shape of the land around you.

You can also craft an axe and pickaxe to cut down trees and dig up the terrain. Everything is destructible around the world and will restore to their original setting if you leave the area for about 30 minutes. Except for anything within the build area of your Flame Altar; those changes are permanent until you remove the Flame Altar and leave the area for 30 minutes. So don't go mining in your backyard unless you want to destroy the natural terrain. Although you can always manually fill it back in with the construction hammer and some stones or dirt.

I found some flint to mine on a cliff side here, which is one of my favorite building blocks. There are dozens of different materials to be found around the world, so you can customize the look of your bases however you want.

I finished building a small rough stone house with plant fiber roof just as it started raining. Which was good, as the blacksmith was starting to complain about not having a roof over his head.

Then the blacksmith informed me of a nearby Elixir Well that needed to be cleared out. Yeah, yeah, as soon as I'm done taking a nap.

The Elixir Wells are home to Shroud Roots: giant red fungus-looking things which are the cause of The Shroud. Chopping them down with an axe will clear the area around the Elixir Well of any Shroud. Although if you leave the area for 30 minutes, it will revert to its original state and the Shroud will come back.

Shroud Roots are guarded by large bosses; in this particular case, a Fell Thunderbrute. When you take down these boss-level characters, you can claim their heads, which you can later mount on your wall in your home. I've been meaning to build a trophy room in my original game's castle...

Destroying the Shroud Root will give you a skill point, which you can spend in a skill tree to further spec your character. There are twelve categories to build out. By the endgame, you will have enough skill points to have nearly maxed out three of them, so you're not locked into one specific category of gameplay. I personally chose Battlemage, Wizard, and Healer. (Since my teammates are always jumping head-first into fights they can't handle, ha!)

As you play on, you'll find more enemies around the world, plenty of quests, materials, and cosmetics to discover, and tons of lore hidden in books and scrolls.

There are varying climates, like desert wastelands, freezing winter mountainscapes, forests, plains, and of course, Shroud valleys and mines everywhere. Or you can get to work building a cozy hobbit hole deep underground, a castle way up in the mountains, or a fairy home deep in the woods.

Don't forget to craft a glider, so you can coast quickly across the various regions. Besides fast travel between Flame Altars, gliding is the best way to travel between places. I like to place my Flame Altars high up on mountains so I can fast-travel there and then jump and glide to my nearby destination.

Just keep an eye on your stamina gauge while you're gliding. Nothing worse than being a mile up in the sky and all of a sudden falling to your doom. If you're about to run out of stamina, the best thing to do is just drop, which will stop consuming stamina, then glide again when you're just about to hit the ground. You'll tuck and roll and take no damage.

Here's my first attempt at building a small castle in the starting zone prairie. You can garden and plant pretty much anything that grows in the game, which is where that massive perfectly-aligned forest came from in the background. You can also build farms and raise animals, or find dogs and cats in the world to keep as pets in your base.

Here's a shot of the main floor inside the castle. The back wall inside the giant fireplace is a secret door, with steps leading down into an underground cavern where my alchemist and blacksmith hang out.

Here's my first attempt at building a castle wall near the top of a mountain. I used glowing blue blocks to create the impression of a moat, which looks fantastic all lit up at night. Water is the one resource you can't build with in this game. (Yet!) The developers have mentioned that it's something they'd like to do, but it's on the back burner for now.

Oh, and that dragon in the first screenshot? My buddies and I took it down. That was a rough fight.

This "Fell Dragon Youngling" is currently the endgame boss. I dunno how big an adult one of these will be, but there are dragon skeletal remains scattered around the world that are bigger than cities! I hope the developers incorporate an adult Fell Dragon in a later update, because that would be an epic endgame challenge!

The map is only about 1/3rd open for exploration, and since early access dropped, two new regions have opened up with new content, including several non-Shroud dungeons with rewards for completion. So there's tons more to come with this game. It's so much fun, no matter whether you enjoy questing, base building, crafting, or just exploring. I highly recommend you check out Enshrouded!

#63 - The Alters

I overheard someone talking about this weird sci-fi cloning space game with survival/crafting/base building elements a few days ago. It sounded so unique, preposterous, and yet intriguing. I had to track it down and check it out.

The Alters is a game about being the sole survivor of a space mission. You are stranded on a dangerous planet and are forced to create clones of yourself - with an altered past - to assist with various specialized roles around your base.

It reminded me a bit of The Invincible, another game about being stranded on an alien planet and trying to escape. Except that game is more of a story-rich walking simulator, while this one actually has you collecting resources and building as you go to ensure your survival.

Also, I want to point out that this game looks incredible in 4K with maxed out graphics settings. So much detail was put into this world! I wish I had 4K video to show the rainfall and the ocean crashing against the beach. Screenshots don't do it justice.

The Alters opens with your character, Jan Dolski, crawling out of an escape pod on a dark planet. It's perpetually raining on this planet. He notices the emergency flare near his pod and sets out to find other crew members by searching for their flares.

He finds the captain's pod intact, but she's dead in her pod. Several other pods can be located nearby, but despite all being intact, they all hold deceased crew members. Jan discovers he's all alone and sets out for the nearby mobile base. It looks like a massive tire with shipping containers arranged inside of it.

All of a sudden, a radioactive wave hits! Jan has limited time to get to the shelter of the mobile base!

Once inside, your view changes to a sort of 3D side-scroller. You can walk around the various interconnected rooms of the base, or you can switch to a base overview mode, which is a cutaway view of all the rooms.

You need to get to the Communication Room to call for help, but you can't currently use the elevator for... reasons. The game teaches you how to rearrange the rooms from the Command Center. I brought the Communications Room down to my floor so I could just walk across to it.

Once there, Jan answers a call, only to get a garbled message from the distant end. They seem able to hear him, but Jan is only getting partial transmissions. The words "imminent danger" catch his ears, and he surmises from the jumbled communication that he has until sunrise in 9 days before he's burnt to a crisp by a nearby star. So now we're on a time limit!

He retreats to the captain's cabin to read the logs for his next steps, then goes to sleep for the night.

I should mention that there is a limited time to be active each day, as you can see in the bottom left of the screen. I definitely wasted a few days wandering around, trying to get familiar with the local area and the mechanics of the game. I'll probably be more streamlined on my next playthrough.

The next day, Jan sets out to find shallow deposits, as there is a shortage of metals on the mobile base. You can track them down by their red glowing light.

When you get enough metals, you can create a Workshop room, where you can craft items.

The first thing you need to craft are scanners. You're looking for organic deposits, which present themselves as blue smoke coming out of the rocky surface. When you find an area like this, you place down several scanners in a square to help scan underground for the best place to drop a mining outpost.

You want to identify the darkest red area underground. I had to make 3 separate scans of the area to find it. Fortunately, you can individually pick up and move your scanners and it will leave the previously scanned area visible.

Once you've dropped a mining outpost, you then need to run pylons all the way back to your mobile base to transfer the organic deposits to your fuel reserves.

I had flashbacks of running transmitter nodes in Deep Rock Galactic while placing all these pylons.

While exploring, I also stumbled across a strange glowing area that made the region fuzzy and streaked. You can see, even on the ground near me, it looks like it's been smeared upward with a giant paintbrush.

This is Rapidium, a plot-centric mineral you need to harvest. Extract a sample and get it back to your base!

You receive a new call from your mysterious garbled connection. You mention the Rapidium, which gets them very excited. They insist you test it to verify it's real. You're sent blueprints to create a new room called "The Womb," along with a DNA sample to test the Rapidium on. You set it up and out pops...

Rapidium, it turns out, was the resource you were sent to find on this expedition. It's an incredibly rare resource that, in theory, can rapidly age an organic item. By combining it with sheep DNA, out pops a cloned adult sheep! Jan names her Molly.

Incidentally, the name of this expedition is "Project Dolly." In real-life history, Dolly was the name of the first cloned sheep. So, a very apropos name for this game's expedition.

By now, the waterfront valley you're located in has (ideally) been picked clean of resources and your mobile base is fully fueled. It's time to get it moving! You go to the Command Center and attempt to start up the engines, but they fail to start. You reset the machinery and try again, which causes a catastrophic failure!

Not knowing what to do, you turn to your garbled friend for help. They mention something about Rapidium being able to save you, and they direct you to check out the data in the base's Quantum Computer. They give you the captain's access and you log in... to find "mind records" of all the crew.

It maps out memories of the major life events of Jan, from his childhood, leading up to his joining of the Project Dolly expedition in his 30s. You can click on each life event and read up about his past.

In the Communications Room, the distant contact suggests using this life data on Jan to create an "alter" with a branching past. The Quantum Computer pinpoints a branching life path in his childhood that would lead Jan to join Project Dolly as a technician, then simulates a fake memory path leading to that end result.

The Womb starts churning, and before you know it, out pops a clone of Jan! Except he's a bit more rough around the edges.

I noticed he has a "03" on his clothing. Jan has a "01" on his suit. What happened to "02?"

"Jan Technician," as he's known in the subtitles, is not happy to discover that he's a clone with fake memories of a life that never happened. He begrudgingly helps you get the base's engine working, but he doesn't want anything else to do with you.

You get a new menu to track your alters. It's important to be aware of their emotional status and keep them happy, as they'll perform poorly if they're in a bad mood. While you're talking with them, you'll occasionally get emotional state clouds pop up behind them. If they're red, they're negative. If they're green, they're positive.

With the engine working, you start up a journey. The mobile base goes on autopilot, heading toward a better pick-up location for your eventual rescue. Meanwhile, you repair the communications (because Jan Technician refuses to help) and you're finally able to speak clearly with someone! Your distant contact is named Lucas Peña and he's fascinated with the results of the Rapidium branching.

When you mention that your clone isn't talking to you, Lucas suggests bonding over a shared memory. I went and convinced him to make pierogi with me, just like Mom used to make!

In a much better mood, Jan Technician informs you that this mobile base is a beast to operate, and the only way the two of you are going to survive is if you make more versions of you. You'll make branching memories to create alters who end up as scientists, botanists, refiners, miners, and doctors, to name a few.

It will quickly get crowded in the mobile base and you'll have to upgrade the size of the base and create more rooms to house all the resources and people that you bring into the world.

I played for 3 hours and only barely finished the prologue! Granted, I took my time and explored everything. By the time Act 1 was starting, I was already on Day 7 of my 10 days until sunrise. So I bet I'm likely to die soon and will have to be more efficient with my next playthrough.

Or who knows where the plot will go; maybe I'll be able to survive the sunrise somehow and get more time to build and expand my army of clones. It seems like too short of a timeline for how story-rich the gameplay is. If you've played this game, let me know how much you enjoy it! I'm excited to play more and find out where the plot leads.