Scaling and Review Notes

Personal Hours Played: 5.8

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 10/18/2023

This game is notable both for being widely loved but also for being a firm twist on the genre by focusing on summoning (though plenty of other games on this list like Keeper's Toll have necromancer or summoner characters or skills.) This is not only one of the best VS-likes, though, it's also one of the best necromancer games ever! Also includes a card game mini-game that's totally optional accessed through your lair.

Lots of unlocks from characters to game modes and a lot of depth in a lofi presentation. Patches may have removed the ability to go infinite without amazing luck unfortunately. It's possible this won't scratch the itch for you if you want to see a lot of attacks/bullets come out of your character. You spend most of the time running away from, not into, mobs of enemies while your summons mop up.

This is one of the more unique and fully realized title on this list and also well supported with an active fandom.

Raring Review Notes: "It's a bullet heaven title with a heavy horde focus. While there are plenty of projectiles, it leans more into dodging large groups of mobs in melee range. While it is isometric depending on the map and the layout you choose through upgrades any map can and will feel different. Opposed to the likes of VS, it features (Mini)bosses with distinctive skills and high mobility. The various classes all have their unique playstyle and the game is not strictly build around weapons and passives."

"Controls are great. You only need movement keys and 2 trigger keys or your stick and 2 buttons"

Raring: "In its core outside of spell based classes it's still a necromancy game. You raise your minions and while you can support them, they will do most of the work for you. In earlier iterations the game used to be fairly hard and unlocking Bosses to raise them as minions felt very rewarding. Sadly my review score took a bit of a hit when it started to orient itself more on VS adding features that made difficulty redundant unless you kept looping for higher leaderboard scores."

"While it has become a tad too easy and as such the incentive of "one more run" has been lowered, it is still a solid recommendations. For less than 5 bucks you get an incredible bang for buck value if achievement hunting is your thing. It's still the best class/necromancy based horde survivor if pixel art is your jam."

Raring and I both came to the same pure vibes score: 8.5

Scaling and Review Notes

Personal Hours Played: 10.8

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 11/16/2023

An interesting game to compare and not unlikely to come up in your search because it's a "survival" game with "hordes" of enemies. It's also top down and a twin stick shooter and randomization, so it's got some surface level similarities. But it's also an incredibly complex game with many controls, so in many ways the polar opposite of something like Vampire Survivors.

It has a campaign mode but also a survival mode with timed waves. The general gameplay loop consists of gathering resources and base building to develop and increase various weapon powers and survive waves of enemies. Set up towers, do research, explore and so on. It's really a rather cool mashup of genres, which got me interested in checking it out.

It's got kind of the polar opposite of "simple level choices", having some of the most complex systems to upgrade your fighting level imaginable (dependent on base building.) I mostly liked that, but for my review score I'll have to note I found the voice acting grating when I should have been loving this. It might hurt that my name is also Ashley so it just felt like my robot dad was yelling at me a lot.

With a game design really revolving around long term play, it's definitely not a roguelite, but with map generation and hardcore mode, it is a non-traditional Roguelike in the same manner that Diablo 2 is a roguelike. I usually use roguelite to refer to metaprogression and I'm not sure if the campaign unlocks apply to hardcore mode yet - and if they do to the survival mode, it actually shares more in common with these games than I thought at first glance. In any case, I'm giving it a partial score in "rogue-lite".

It doesn't have a sprawling open world or stretching maps, but you do explore to other maps through the same game when playing the campaign. Aesthetics feels a little like some custom Star Trek map with one mech defending from waves of zerg rushes. Voice acting and writing is kind of annoying imho, probably could have done entirely without it but it doesn't intrude too often.

It feels a bit more bullet heaven when you equip a gun on each hand and stand near a million towers you set up. Enemies do have ranged attacks, though. All in all it's more of an ARPG / base building hybrid and not a survivors-like, but it could tickle your fancy for long term wave defense with more complex systems.

Scaling and Review Notes

Personal Hours Played: 378.8

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 10/23/2023

Now with a graphics inclusive version on Steam, Dwarf Fortress is inspired by classical Rogue-likes, but your permadeath possible "run" is managing a fortress with many characters instead of just one. Over the years the game has gained a lot of features that bring it more close to contemporary games than Rogue itself. The extreme differences in genre and control and mechanics makes it very hard to rate on our scale (which is designed to tease out subtle differences in very similar games) but it's interesting to test the scale. It is, after all, technically an "endless wave survival" game.

Mostly real time, but with a lot of optional pauses. For the movement section, we're counting all the various controls (there are many) for categories like "special moves" but there's no reflex "dodge", etc. DF doesn't have any victory conditions or set challenges, a huge difference. Nor does it let you chose how to level your characters, they progress themselves. Eventually, there are big hordes of enemy invaders, usually.

Worth noting the "Adventure" mode not reviewed here has both more in common with original Rogue and modern Rogue-lites.

This is an amazing game, but again we're mostly including it here to show how the scale is used and can be used for just about anything. There's more about it in the scoring guide, like many of the ones included to test and then demonstrate the scale.

And I guess it's here because I can't resist a chance to talk about Dwarf Fortress.

Scaling and Review Notes

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 11/3/2023

Scale scoring from scorecard submitted by Developer. Once evaluated after a couple hours play and some research, will be adjusted and moved up into the ranking proper.

Like Soundodger+, this one I solicited a dev scorecard on because I was very curious to have more movement focused and especially pacifist games on here. I look forward to doing a whole review soon.

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Scaling and Review Notes

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 11/22/2023

Scale scoring from scorecard submitted by Developer. Once evaluated after a couple hours play and some research, will be adjusted and moved up into the ranking proper.

Dev Note: "Not very similar, but can appeal to some of the same players"

Help us rank this game! [Submit Review]

Scaling and Review Notes

Review Disclaimer

Every game ranked was played, but also scaled based on research, talking to developers & your feedback. The priority with the scale's initial design was to compare similarity on relatively objective features - so it doesn't claim to include reviews of the depth and clarity you'd get at a games journalism site, nor the intensive time played you might get from player reviews on steam. We try to incorporate and link all of that along with a 'review scale' that checks for bugs. See the heatmap and breakdown! Time played noted so you can take any notes with a big grain of salt! I can't get to high level gameplay in 850+ games so I heavily research every game. Over 80 game creators let me interview or survey them! I Hope to go back and refine. Please argue or submit your own scores and reviews to be incorporated with credit into the notes and score numbers.

Added or last checked on 11/20/2023

Scale scoring from scorecard submitted by player reviewer. Once evaluated after a couple hours play and some research, will be adjusted and moved up into the ranking proper.

zza675's scorecard notes: "I would say it's fairly different from VS it as its more focused on exploring a linier dungeon with rooms instead of an open one."

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