Vampire Survivors Review as a Couch Co-op Game

Most couch co-op games I review with my partner fail in the same way. One of us is better at the game, so that person ends up carrying, and the other one spends the evening either apologising or holding a controller while watching. After about forty minutes the weaker player suggests "one more" in a tone that means the opposite. Finding something we both enjoy on a Tuesday night, without one of us being a passenger, is harder than finding a good game.

Vampire Survivors was never sold as a co-op game. It launched as a single player curiosity, a five dollar early access release in late 2021 with deliberately crude pixel art. Local co-op for up to four players arrived later, in an update during 2023. I came to it expecting a quick novelty. We have now put somewhere north of sixty evenings into it together, and I think it is one of the best shared-screen games of the last few years, for reasons that have little to do with what it looks like.

What you actually do

You pick a character and walk around a large map. That is the only control. Your weapons fire on their own. Enemies, starting with bats and skeletons and building to screen-filling swarms, walk toward you, and when they die they drop gems. Collect enough gems and you level up, choosing a new weapon or passive item from a short random list. A run on a standard stage lasts thirty minutes, and at the thirty minute mark the Reaper appears and ends it, which is a delightfully blunt way of telling you the session is over.

The depth comes from evolutions. Get a weapon to its maximum level, hold the right passive item, survive past the ten minute mark, and the next treasure chest will turn the weapon into something far stronger. The Whip paired with Hollow Heart becomes Bloody Tear, which heals you as it hits. Magic Wand with Empty Tome becomes Holy Wand, firing without any cooldown. King Bible with Spellbinder becomes Unholy Vespers, a ring of books that never stops spinning. Discovering these combinations is most of the fun of the first ten hours, and the in-game collection screen tracks what you have found.

Why it works with two people on a sofa

The skill gap barely shows

Because nobody aims and nobody presses attack, the input skill that separates experienced and casual players in most games simply is not there. The skill that does matter is reading the screen, choosing upgrades, and moving away from danger, and those are things a newer player picks up in a couple of runs. My partner plays far fewer games than I do. Within a week, she was making better build choices than me, because she reads the item descriptions and I skim them.

The shared screen helps rather than hurts

In co-op, all players share one view and the camera follows the group. That sounds restrictive, but it forces you to move together, and moving together is what keeps you alive. Our best runs happen when one of us takes area weapons like Garlic or Santa Water and plays close to the enemies, while the other uses long range picks and covers the edges. Nobody explained that division to us. It just emerged after a few deaths.

Talking is the game

Level-up choices happen often enough that you are constantly narrating. "I'm taking Spinach, you take the Tome." "Don't take another wand, we have three." That running conversation is what makes it feel shared. In plenty of co-op games, I realise afterwards we barely spoke except to complain.

The best co-op games are the ones where the weaker player is never sure they are the weaker player. Vampire Survivors manages that almost by accident.

Where it falls short

I would be misleading you if I said it was flawless together. A few things bothered us consistently.

The screen gets illegible in the last ten minutes. With two or more players and several evolved weapons, the effects pile up until we genuinely cannot see our own characters. There is a setting to reduce flashing and visual effects, and I would switch it on immediately. It helps, but late runs on busy stages are still a blur.

Progression is shared unevenly. Gold earned in co-op goes toward permanent upgrades in the shop, but unlocks and achievements hang off the main save. If you share a console with one profile, this barely matters. If two people want separate progress, it gets awkward.

And the core loop does wear thin. Around the forty hour mark we hit a stretch of evenings where every run felt the same, and we put it down for a month. The paid expansions, which add new stages, characters and weapons, brought us back. Legacy of the Moonspell and Tides of the Foscari each cost a few dollars and added a fresh stage and a cluster of new evolutions. I would only buy them once you have exhausted the base game, because the base game alone has an absurd amount in it.

Who should skip it

If you need a story, there is effectively none. The characters are names and a passive bonus. If either of you dislikes visual noise, the late game will be unpleasant regardless of settings. And if your idea of co-op is precise coordination, as in Portal 2 or It Takes Two, this will feel loose and chaotic. Our review of It Takes Two covers that more structured kind of partnership.

For everyone else, especially pairs with uneven experience, the price to fun ratio is ridiculous. If you are new to games that build around short repeated runs, our explainer on what a roguelike is gives the background, though Vampire Survivors is gentler than most of its relatives, since permanent upgrades make every failed run count toward the next one.

The verdict, and a first evening plan

Buy it, plug in a second controller, and play at least three runs on the first stage, Mad Forest, before you judge it. The first run will look like nothing. By the third you will have found an evolution, and you will be arguing about who gets the Spinach. Agree before you start that one of you takes area weapons and the other takes ranged ones, and see how long you last together. If you want a sense of whether a cheap game is worth your money more generally, we laid out our approach in how to know if a game is worth your money.