These days, you see the word ‘Survivors’ in a game title, and you automatically assume the game in question is a Vampire Survivors-style game. Why wouldn’t you? After all, there are loads of ’em: Driveloop Survivors, Achilles: Survivor, Hive Jump 2: Survivors, Primal Survivors, Gallowspire Survivors… I could go on, but you get the point. Hollow Survivors, however, developed by Danny Deer and available now on Steam, bucks the trend — and more power to it, I say.
Sure, it came as a bit of a surprise when I stood there, enemies marching towards me, and my character didn’t automatically swing a weapon or fire out a bullet. I actually have to press a button to attack — the audacity of it! But once I got over the shock of Hollow Survivors not being a Survivors-like, I started to appreciate this action-packed roguelike.
While it shares some things in common with the Survivors-like genre, Hollow Survivors very much marches to the beat of its own drum. It doesn’t care about absolutely swarming you with enemies, for example. Instead, it will dole out a handful at a time, challenging you to carefully plan your fight against them. Dodging is essential here, and you’ll need to time your attacks in between avoiding enemy fire. It’s fraught, tense, and requires much more skill and coordination than simply walking around in Vampire Survivors.
After clearing a few waves of enemies, you’ll ascend to the next level. Each level gets a bit tougher, but none of them are massive — you’ll still only be fighting a handful of enemies at once in a rather small area. There’s no endless wandering around here: you simply need to fight, survive, and then move on.
What Hollow Survivors does have in common with the Survivors-like genre, however, is its upgrade system. You’ll frequently be given new upgrades to choose between, each of which will offer you some sort of perk. Maybe your attacks will also deal an amount of damage over time, for example. Or maybe you’ll have a chance to automatically heal every time you take a hit. It’s up to you what you choose, but the upgrades you opt for can have a major impact on your success — some of them are much more powerful than others, after all.
This is not for the faint of heart, though. Hollow Survivors is tough and it doesn’t even attempt to go easy on you — particularly if you were expecting a traditional Survivors-like experience. Chances are, your first few runs will end very prematurely, but at least thanks to permanent coins and upgrade systems, you can slightly improve yourself, giving you more of a fighting chance next time.
And you know what they say: practice makes perfect. If you’re up for the challenge, stick with Hollow Survivors and you’ll improve in no time. It might not be the Survivors-like I was expecting, but the challenge it offers has been pleasantly surprising.
Hollow Survivors is available now Steam, priced just £8.50/$9.99. Buy before 24th April and you’ll get a 10% launch discount, too.
