So I played a couple new games. On the left, we have Hell Maiden, which is like if CLAMP made Vampire Survivors. On the right we have Arms of God, which is like if... well, I don't have a cute analogy. It's another Vampire Survivors-clone but you're a Templar, lots of holy this-and-that. I mean, they both have a lot of Christian themes, funny enough. So—they're both bullet heaven (har har), Vampire Survivors games, and, as you might guess from the pics, they are very different flavors.
We'll start with Hell Maiden, because I started with Hell Maiden. I first heard of it after Youtube recommended me someone Let's Playing the demo after I watched a couple videos on the studio's other games, Little Goody Two Shoes and Pocket Mirror. To be honest, I don't know much about these games, and I forget what the videos I watched were—something between "Top 10 Unknown Indie Gems You NEED To Play!" and "This Cute Game Is Hiding The Darkest Story In Gaming." They have an extremely cute 90s magical girl style, yuri as hell, everyone with colorful sprites with bouncy animation. The previous games are RPGs or, something—I just remembered, I was so interested that I skipped the second half of the video, which gets into the dark spoilers.
Anyway, this game is a VS clone. It has beautiful animation and a voiced story and great music, but, you know what? The gameplay is just... too slow. Even with maximum speed boosts, you ooze across the levels. Your attacks are slow, you level slowly, your upgrades progress slowly—everything's slow except the enemies' attacks, they flash out instant AOEs you have to dash to avoid, and then they do it again and again... dash is on cooldown, so. You're punished for aggressing the enemies because they can just drown you in AOEs, while you're still waiting for your weapon to cast. You have to constantly run away, and hopefully circle back later to pick up the experience points. The first level was hard, but I was able to clear it. The second is just impossible. Three minutes in, you get attacked by the succubus, and she clones herself and shoots fast homing bullets at you. You can't dodge them, you certainly can't outrun them, and you're penned into a ring to fight her. It's a nightmare. It's just... not fun.
You get about 100 Resource if you can survive all 12 minutes of level 1 and beat the boss, and you can get permanant upgrades with that. The cost for these goes 50, 200, 400... so you have to seriously grind to get a few percent of attack damage or speed. Movement speed caps at +30% which feels like nothing, and it's not enough to outrun any enemies. I'm still dying in level 1 half the time; I don't even try level 2 because I can't live long enough to make it worthwhile. There are shrines in-level that give you bonuses for that run, but they're scattered at random. You have to stand in them for a few seconds, which is hard to do when if you stop for a microsecond, everything dogpiles you and wipes you out fast.
Your in-run upgrades are fairly simple. You can have up to four weapons, and each one can take three mod cards; damage, attack speed, that stuff. Duplicate cards upgrade. There's also some like "all weapons to the left get +20% damage" so there's an element of how you order your hand, but you can change that when you level so it's not a big deal. Some levelups also give you global charms, +5% damage to all weapons, and that's also where you get some more movement speed bonuses. I swear, the game doesn't feel good at all unless you have the +30% meta bonus, and then get up to +56% from in-level buffs. But what's frustrating is that each card comes from a particular character, so if you reroll your options, you get new cards from the same character. And some of them only have like 3 cards, so all it does is give you the same options in a different order.
The game is really pretty. The art is lovely, I like the voice acting, and I like the writing. I love Dante; she woke up with no memory, and she's not taking any bullshit. She sees right through Virgil's lies and is immediately "All right, let's get to work" and starts kicking monster ass. The splash screens when you level up, upgrade weapons and stuff, is very cool. Also you have an ultimate move that's a full-blown Sailor Moon attack, full-screen animation, which is pretty awesome.
Overall? Looks beautifull, plays so uncomfortably, too hard, costs $10. Worth it in my imo.
Arms of God is the exact same but completely different. Steam recommended it to me because—well, never mind why. In this one you're a Knight Templar with a robot suit with four extra arms—to hold all your extra weapons. It starts with a short 3D cutscene and then it's right to the game. It's a solo dev project, and there's an amount of jank, especially in the menus, and it appears to be the guy's first solo project. (Side note: "solo dev" almost always means "but I hired someone else to do the music." And it does in this case as well.) Now, here's the thing: compared to Hell Maiden, it plays great. Hell, it even compares favorably with the OG, Vampire Survivors itself.
The overall structure is quite different. Rather than endless levels, you have small, 90-second missions. Fifteen missions in each of the game's four Acts. Between missions, you have a shopping phase; it's not the "pick one" you usually get, but all options are available, if you picked up enough souls. You can have five weapons, one in your hands and one in each robot hand, and each one can take a slew of upgrades. Also, the upgrades are all complicated; this one increases fire damage by 6.8% but lowers piercing by 1; this one increases explosion change by 28.5% but lowers holy damage by 18.5%; and so on. When you're full of weapons, you can also convert an existing weapon to an upgrade to apply to another weapon. Duplicate weapons can be combined to rank them up. And, any souls you didn't pick up in the field get absorbed by the Crux, and that thing has its own buffs you can buy; it creates an aura that heals you, erodes enemy armor, and so on.
But wait, that's not all! Each level has some side objectives; lecturns that unlock new blessings, banners that give you buffs, and chests that have one of six (six!) different kinds of resources, that you need to upgrade your base later. There's the bell to summon new characters, the statue to unlock permanent buffs, the gunsmith workshop to, you guessed it—and so on. Compared to Hell Maiden, it's far more complicated. HM has a rich visual language, Arms has mechanical complexity. And? Really fucking badass looking characters. Knights Templar with laser guns and glowing holy spears? Sign me the fuck up! (Is there a girl knight? There's one girl knight. More sexy, badass nuns please.)
Between each mission you get a paragraph moving the story forward on the Press Start screen; it's not extremely deep but the pacing is very good. In fact—that's the biggest difference between HM and Arms. The pacing. HM is punishingly hard, movement is slow, combat is slow, and the story is drip-fed to you as you gradually succeed. Arms' pacing is excellent in all regards; movement feels good instantly, your upgrades are substatial and meaningful, and I never felt like I was pointlessly plinking away at overpowered enemies; they quickly fell and when I died, it was because I was cocky and greedy and ran into a crowd to get a treasure chest or something, not because enemies keep spawning faster than they can be killed. Rewards are ample, I don't have to do the first mission a million times to upgrade to get strong enough for the second. And the 90-second fast-paced missions where I'm gunning down enemies while dodging them to collect all the banners are well broken up by moments of calm where I can look through the store, figure out my loadout, and read the blurb for the next mission. Everything comes constantly, without being overwhelming, and without leaving a drought.
Both games are in Early Access; Hell Maiden came out yesterday and Arms of God was like a month ago. Remains to be seen how much the devs continue to care for their children, but that's always the case. They're both inexpensive, $10 for Hell Maiden and some weird number for Arms of God but it was like $11ish. I'm content with my purchases, I had my fun. Hell Maiden is a visual treat, but Arms of God is more fun to play; but I think Arms of God is a far shorter game, difficulty padding notwithstanding.
How do they compare to the original? I mean... there's no comparison. Vampire Survivors perfected the genre it invented (I know, it didn't invent it), with more secrets, more characters, more weapons, more synergies than anything. Also: neither of these games have the same endless feature as VS. HM's levels are 11 minutes, then a one-minute countdown until the boss comes out. Arms, like I said, these short missions—and you can even save and quit between them. Your build persists through the Act but it's not like VS where I can literally put the controller down, go to the store, come back and the timer's at 2 hours and I have 12 million gold. —but neither of these games seems to have anything that costs 12 million gold.
Anyway, they're both good... but Arms of God is better.
Okay, that's enough for now. I hate acting like a reporter, but what else am I going to blog about, revealing thoughts and feelings? Fuck you, no. :p
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