We really need to sit down and vote on a term for the sub-genre that Vampire Survivors has - perhaps not created, but certainly refined and catapulted into the mainstream as one of the best games of the past few years. I'm a fan of auto-bullet hell myself, but there's a compelling case to give it the Metroidvania treatment and just rob the game's title. Whatever it is, this kind of game is extremely hard to put down and white-hot right now, and clearly the folks behind the Nicolas Cage movie Renfield noticed the trend. After all, they've commissioned a Vampire Survivors clone based on the film, and I'm both pleased and surprised to report that it's actually pretty good.
Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood is an auto-bullet hell game – I'm just rolling with that label now – where you mow down screens of dudes using weapons and abilities unlocked by collecting XP dropped by said dudes. Every level up is a little drafting decision between three random options. I might wonder if I want to upgrade my bat laser, increase my critical hit chance, or add a rat cannon to my automatic arsenal. You also earn gold which you can spend on permanent upgrades to bring into future runs, including unlockable weapons and characters.
The bones of Renfield: BYOB are not like Vampire Survivors. The core of this game is Vampire Survivors, almost weapon-for-weapon at times. It has a different – and honestly pretty nice – aesthetic and setting, but it's mostly identical under the hood. This raises a few important questions. Firstly, what does it do differently from Vampire Survivors?
A better question might be: should you play this game after Vampire Survivors?
Instead of a giant map with ever-escalating waves of enemies, you fight through smaller stages with predetermined mobs. Once you clear a stage, you can choose which direction to head in next, though in my experience this choice doesn't dramatically alter runs. That said, some stages trigger unique events like survivors who you can kill for a quick heal or rescue to get a bigger bonus after a future stage, sort of like the Little Sisters in BioShock.
The wave-based nature of enemy mobs also adds a wrinkle of strategy to your room-clearing ultimate ability, which charges up as you deal damage normally. It comes up way too quickly for something that basically deletes everything in sight, but it is satisfying to use and knowing when to fire it is important because time is precious in Renfield. Vampire Survivors is about staying alive for 30 minutes, but in my experience Renfield is more about killing enemies as quickly as possible in order to reach bosses before you run out of time and your health starts to tick down. There are limits since your weapon's are basically out of your control, but this subtly encourages a more aggressive play style over safely kiting enemies around, and that in turn creates a fine balancing act for positioning, especially with plenty of enemy projectiles flying around.
Renfield: BYOB is a fun, $5 game that works well, especially for a project that just started its stay in early access. I don't know if I should be surprised by the quality of a tie-in ripoff, or unsurprised by the fact that good ideas from another game still hold up here. The question is, should you play it instead of Vampire Survivors? I would say no. If you didn't like Vampire Survivors, I don't think a clone is going to change your opinion, not unless you're an absolute diehard Renfield fan. And if you did like Vampire Survivors, while Renfield is solid – and not just in a 'for a tie-in project' kind of way – it loses in variety, polish, and creativity. I'll give it one thing, though: Renfield has a bitchin' soundtrack.
A better question might be: should you play this game after Vampire Survivors? Sure. If you've done everything there is to do in Vampire Survivors and you want more of that, you'll probably enjoy this, and I can easily see it improving with some updates. It needs more characters, weapons, and stages, not to mention some controller and bug fixes, but it's a competent riff on a proven formula. It's The Surge 2 vs. Dark Souls all over again, or Wild Hearts vs. Monster Hunter. It's a good game that's worse than the game that inspired it, but it's a lot better than I expected and it's still a fun time-killer for auto-bullet hell fans who simply can't get enough. Maybe if I use that term enough times it'll catch on.
