Tags: Topdown - Isaaclike
Additional Tags: Delete Local Content & Remove from Library
TLDR: Survival roguelike. Kind of a Dont Starve/Isaac hybrid. Poor hitboxing. Stutters. Instadeaths. Few assets per world. Odd class balance. Lack of tooltips. Poor UI.
Vampire of the sands has a weird tristram from Diablo music, but latino, and more upbeat. Meanwhile there are no soundFX whatsoever and the game is mute.
You collect little runes that you can, in theory, from the main menu, arrange in a pattern, sort of like minecraft crafting, and uh... it gives a bonus? Runes are given at match end if I understood correctly.
Otherwise... you start in the same world everytime but have access to some sort of a hub from which you can then descend in a different set of staircase, cleverly represented by a unique statue for ease of recognition.
Some worlds are more undead themed, others more meatboy/isaaclike while others are just pest like the desert one. Ultimately there are few sprites per world and the game looks very samey except when transitionning between worlds, as such they should have probably just made procedurally generated biomes and mixed it all in the same world.
Game yields no experience, you do not gain any noticeable perks. Weapons each fire in a unique arc, some fire in a fixed position even when firing mice in opposite direction. All weapons degrade on use and must be manually swapped in and out through a somewhat clunky inventory menu. Monsters constantly respawn.
To make up for that, if you pay close attention, you can spot scenery objects that act as as spawners, destroying those stops the flow of additional units.
There is an odd survival system called soul hunger, I have no figured out how to sate it, but in theory shutting down all spawners could mean a death by attrition if it is the way in by which you counteract that mechanic. There is a character that is immune to soul hunger at the expense of armor. Since everything insta-kills you it seemed to make sense to pick this one.
Finally the nail on the coffin is that your tiny sprite often overlaps vertically on top of other sprites, but without any cleaner hitboxing it leads to a death, even though in theory your character is on a different plane further down and should not be struck dead for that. Other times the game will get a microstutter when opening doors, or when activating a weapon for the first time. Could be from accessing game from a mechanical hard drive but that is still disappointing behavior on behalf of the engine and given the tight failure margins on this game, this can and will kill you if you suffer from it making the game arguably unplayable.
The minimap was clean and the map layouts were interesting to look at and encouraged exploration.
Conclusion: While there would be a lot to like from Vampire of the Sands if all core mechanics were tightened, it is ultimately too amateur to really compare to Gungeon, Rogue Legacy, Isaac Rebirth, Dont Starve and the like. Given the many shortcomings I am removing it permanently for declutter.
