A Pulse-Pounding Survivor Game with too Little to Do
If there’s a game genre that can handle a bit of grinding (outside of skateboarding games), it’s the Survivors genre. It’s part of the deal: you’re playing these games knowing that you’re going to be dying, coming back, dying, coming back, all the while hoping that the dying happens later than it did the previous time.
But slapping ‘Grind’ in the title of your Survivor takes some audacity. The mention of grind isn’t just lip-service, either: Grind Survivors is possibly the grindiest Survivor game that we’ve played. Is that a good thing? Well, that’s a complicated one to answer…
A Good View Helps to Alleviate the Grind
One thing’s for certain, Grind Survivors is a gorgeous, lavish little game. There aren’t many Survivors games that have this kind of production quality (I associate Survivors with Vampire Survivors and Megabonk, for example, which are very not-lavish). Grind Survivors ensures that every spell you cast, every attack that hits, is overblown with pyrotechnics, bloom, exploding corpses and lightning bolts. These have the backdrop of attractive cel-shaded characters and environments to ensure that Grind Survivors is only beaten by Deep Rock Galactic Survivor for sheer quality of presentation.
Grind Survivors makes the surprising choice to offer you two ways to play. You can play the ‘easier’, more Survivor-like way, with auto-attacks and no need to direct your projectiles. But there’s also the more difficult, twin-stick shooter-inspired way, which requires you to aim and trigger your attacks. As Survivor fans, we tended to opt for the former, and slightly resented being told it was easier. You move slower while firing with auto-attacks, so there’s an argument that it’s the other way round.
As a Survivor fan, we were like ducks to water. It’s the classic formula: you start in a wide open clearing, with a smattering of zombie enemies ambling towards you. The opening moments are all about killing them, snagging their XP crystals, and choosing the first few perks.
A Rather Perky Combat System
The perks are great. They are not only broad – covering elemental effects like Pyromania and Lightning, as well as more stat-based benefits like Piercing, Speed, Shields and XP Gain – but they overlap neatly. You can be picking up a perk to increase your Health, but you might get some Speed benefits as a BOGOF. It makes the perk moment more satisfying, as you hover over the effects to see just what you’re getting. There are some neat toys in there, making them a bit like Kinder Eggs.
The perks don’t stop offering surprises. Perks have a kind of skill tree, as you progress to the really juicy, transformative stuff by focusing on one perk category at a time. There are synergies, too, which are helpfully noted in the perk itself. You need to accidentally find these combination perks – which can be frustrating if you’re searching out something in particular – but they are ridiculously powerful if you snag one or two. On some of the higher bounties and levels, I’m not sure if I would have won without some of the better synergies.
The perks start stacking up, which of course means that the number of enemies start stacking up too. Hoards of mobs attack, and bosses layer on top. Grind Survivors is a cruel parent, and will often build walls around you and toss in a Demon Lord or Slime Boss. That ‘Speed’ perk becomes less useful when you can’t actually leave the pig pen that you’ve been restricted to.
To give you something to aim towards, spatial markers appear on the screen telling you that shrines have appeared. Head to these and you can get benefits that are a smidge worse than the level perks. But you’re getting them far more frequently, so they are still important. Power-ups like XP magnets and multi-shots, plus the inevitable loot, add more reasons to double-back on yourself.
More Rogue-Heavy than Rogue-Lite
All that’s left to do is die, and this takes you to an absolute avalanche of interfaces. If we listed everything you can do between runs, we would be here all day. But the headlines are a Skill Tree where your Red Ash (gained from bosses) can be spent for permanent benefits; Runes, gained by performing feats in the game, which allow you to create specific builds; and the Forge, where your loot can be recycled into other items, reforged into something better, or improved.
‘Improving’ deserves some expansion, as it plays into all my worst impulses. You can spend some of Grind Survivors’ currency, Ash, on gambling on a stat-increase. Are you willing to spend some Ash on a huge increase to your weapon, but with a 40% chance that the gun might lose all of its improvements? It’s psychotic, but I kind of love it. I always made sure I had a second weapon for this gambling approach, where I would roll a dice on whether it would improve, and wouldn’t care too much if it didn’t.
All of this is brilliant. This framework around Grind Survivors is as comprehensive as you would want. Finishing a run doesn’t mean one or two benefits are unlocked: there are often dozens, particularly if you’ve done well. I love diving into a new build (shall we try Curses this time?), socketing Runes that synergise with that build, and equipping loot that serves it too. If I do well, the game will generally give me five or six things to improve.
But it’s that ‘grind’ word that complicates matters. There’s no doubt that the avatar has a multitude of ways to improve and change, but the stuff that happens outside of the avatar – things like enemies, levels, bosses, objectives, ways to play – don’t change all that much at all. And it undermines so much of the good work in Grind Survivors.
There’s a lot Wrong with a Little Bump and Grind
I really don’t understand why the unlock system is the way it is. Stand victorious over a level and you won’t get a new level to play. Oh no: you get a new difficulty tier for that level. There are five difficulty tiers, and you will need to complete all of them to finally, eventually, unlock Burned Forest and Bastion, the other two levels. Since you will likely fail a number of times on each difficulty tier (you need to gain their new level of loot, for a start), that’s a lot of level-replay.
When you do, finally reach the next level, not all that much changes. There’s a couple of new enemies and a couple of bosses, but the vast majority are the same. And the levels don’t try anything new. The walls and blockages are reskinned, and that’s it.
There is a similar meagreness to the new characters and weapon categories. We got our second character ten hours into the game, and our first unlocked weapon at about five hours. It’s a long time to dilly-dally with the inferior, barely-worth-bothering-with standard guns and character. Honestly, I’ve tried to make an SMG build, and I can never make it work. But the main takeaway here is that stuff gets dripfed, and there’s barely any variety on the path to it.
Which leads to one final weirdness that’s also connected to how Grind Survivors is balanced. Some stuff is just overwhelmingly superior to everything else. Forget Revolvers, SMGs or Shotguns: the Tesla Cannon is where it’s at. It’s so much easier to play and devastating than anything else on offer. The same goes for the characters. A couple, in particular, are leagues ahead of the others. So, why play anything else?
A Finger on the Balancing Scales
The same goes for the perks. There are just too many enemies in the final difficulty tiers, which forces your hand when it comes to choosing benefits. Dodge and Shield are effectively must-haves. In our experience, you can’t shoot your way out of problems: you have to outlive them. Which, we should also note, doesn’t make you feel all that empowered.
I am a Survivors junkie and I love the cocktail they offer: one finger of action-dopamine and two fingers of more-ishness from the roguelike aspects. There is no question that Grind Survivors gets the dopamine right. Bouncing from shrine to shrine as you leave explosions and bodies in your wake is great fun, and it looks stupendous too.
It’s the more-ishness where Grind Survivors stumbles. While it gives you plenty of ways to build your avatar, it doesn’t give you enough to do in terms of levels, objectives or enemies. And the meagre unlocks are spread too thinly over what little is there. That ‘Grind’ in the title begins to feel less a selling point, and more a warning.
Important Links
Face Endless Demon Hordes In Grind Survivors – https://www.thexboxhub.com/face-endless-demon-hordes-in-grind-survivors/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/grind-survivors/9MVMQCGV5MB9
