Monster Rush Survivors Review

Less Bullet Heaven and More Bullet Limbo

While I consider myself a fan of ‘Survivor’ games (or Bullet Heaven games, as the trend seems to be going), I haven’t really sat down and thought about what is important or not important for a game in the genre to work. Monster Rush Survivors has changed that. It’s low-budget, so – by necessity – it has cut out chunks of the Vampire Survivors template. And having played Monster Rush Survivors, it’s become clear that I needed those chunks.

Ticking all the Survivor Boxes

Things looked good at the start. I could see plenty of greyed out characters to unlock, multiple inventory slots to fill – weapons, armours, shields, jewellery – and a 6×5 grid of levels to play: biomes running horizontally, difficulties running vertically. Progression in a Bullet Heaven game is vital, and this seemed to have loot and levels aplenty. For a £4.19 game, it felt substantial.

The presentation is decent, if a little smartphone. It’s colourful, and the enemies are bug-eyed beasties that fit the Monster Rush theme well. More importantly, it had the tempo right. The start is benign, as you pling-pling a few enemies and pick up their XP gems. Unlocks come almost immediately, and there are LOTS of them.

I’d like to pause for a moment and talk about just how good these upgrades are. I’m still unlocking new attacks and there are dozens of them. Every permutation of AoE or projectile has been thought about. You can have projectiles that ricochet, loop, fire like a gatling gun or explode like a claymore. They layer onto each other brilliantly, too, as it’s often best to pick an attack category and then supplement it with secondary powers. It feels great to have an arsenal of AoE attacks, painted on the floor, and to amplify them through upgrades that increase their size and duration. Like any Bullet Heaven should, you can reach the point where you just sit in a blast radius and wait for the bosses to appear.

The upgrades aren’t just limited to attacks, either. I like to make sure I have at least one upgrade that focuses on survivability. Health regen or reduced incoming damage are pretty much must-haves. But every aspect of the game has been thought about, from XP generation to critical damage to speed. 

Monster Rush Survivors gets its in-game buffs very, very right. Now I think about it, it’s the central reason for why I persisted for so long. Cube Games were definitely on the money when it came to focusing on these things. 

Searching for a Point Among the Enemies

Let’s unpause and go back to the tempo of Monster Rush Survivors, because matters start to unravel from this point onwards.

Playing a game of Monster Rush Survivors is strangely aimless. There isn’t anywhere to go. There are no locations in the game: no areas to build like in Achilles: Survivor, resources to gather like Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, or boss areas like Halls of Torment. Bizarrely, there aren’t even spatial markers on the edges of the screen telling you that there is a treasure chest or particularly good item drop. This lack did odd things to how I played Monster Rush Survivors.

Without an objective, I found that the optimal way to play was to travel in a circle. Hordes would attack, but inevitably there would be too many to completely kill. So, I would kite the horde round and round, picking up the XP gems and loot that I had trimmed off them. To play any other way felt bad: I wasn’t gaining my hard-won gems, and the enemies were getting increasingly swarmy. I learned that this was the only way to play. And it wasn’t fun or varied.

There also wasn’t much in the way of escalation. The best loot was just as likely to arrive at the start of the round as the end. There were no minibosses or events to ratchet up the tension. All that was left was a boss, at the end of the ten-minute run, and that boss was always, without exception, a formality. If I was strong enough to survive till the tenth minute, then I was strong enough to kill a boss that was vulnerable to long-range.

Waiting for the Windfall of Upgrades

Completing a run wasn’t quite as satisfying as I hoped, either. Don’t get us wrong – there is a ridiculous amount of loot in Monster Rush Survivors. But it’s illusory: the items don’t do much that’s different from each other. Take the weapons: it’s possible to have a high rarity gun and sword to choose between, which should be significant. But they both do the same thing, namely nudging up stats. They will boost your attack and defense with slightly different values, but you’re not suddenly switching from long-range to melee.

There are lots of these weird quirks that turned me completely off the loot system. There is no point in collecting lower-rarity stuff. You can ‘combine’ them with identical loot, but that moves them up the level ladder, not the rarity ladder. And since rarity is the only thing that matters (if you have a dark-blue item, it will always be better than a light-blue or yellow item), that scuppers the whole ‘combining’ thing. Even then, within a rarity, Monster Rush Survivors chooses to make things ‘better’ rather than ‘different’. There’s very little agency to be had when you have ten weapons, all increasing the same stats, but one just increases it more. You’re going to pick that one.

Oh, and if you can find a use for the amulets, then please – tuck a comment in at the end of the review. We have spent an unholy amount of time trying to work out what they do, as you can’t socket them onto your character in any way. The text says you can, and they even proclaim great benefits if you do, but we reached the conclusion that they were bugged.

Not a Bad Experience, Just a Flawed One

It’s all such a shame. Monster Rush Survivors is absolutely brilliant at letting you form a unique build when inside the game. The buffs that you can stack are varied and powerful, and I’ve completed levels with vastly different approaches. But the moment you are outside the game, there are only minimal, incremental ways that you can tinker with your character. It’s night and day.

I completely understand that Monster Rush Survivors had to make concessions as a budget Bullet Heaven game. But I can’t help feeling that the wrong concessions were made. A strong upgrade and loot system is critical to playing in the long-term, and it’s just not here. It may look like it’s here, but it’s smoke and mirrors. There really isn’t much to Monster Rush Survivors’ progression system.

And while the gameplay feels great, I needed a destination while I played. It’s not enough to let the player strafe in the same spot for ten minutes: they need something to do, and it’s here where Monster Rush Survivors has a hole. All it needed was a flashing indicator with a chest on it, and we’d have felt more like we were working towards something. 

It leaves Monster Rush Survivors feeling like an admirable attempt to make a Survivor game on a shoestring budget, but its plate is a little bare. The result is that you won’t be playing for long.

Important Links

Monster Rush Survivors Hits Xbox – Thousands Of Enemies And Wild Builds – https://www.thexboxhub.com/monster-rush-survivors-hits-xbox-thousands-of-enemies-and-wild-builds/

Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/monster-rush-survivors/9PLW7J0V9PDG/0010