Vampire Survivors is a game that took the world by storm. While not the first title to do what is effectively a reverse bullet hell, where the player is the one producing voluminous amounts of bullets against increasing waves of enemy forces, Vampire Survivors has definitely been one of the most popular. Conquest Dark, which is now available on Steam, is a new Vampire Survivors-like, differentiating itself from its contemporaries by using an interesting bleed system with a dodge mechanic like in Death Must Die, making this an experience that requires a bit more planning and manual dexterity than a lot of others in the genre that are more automated.
Plot Ahoy!
If it’s story you’re looking for, Conquest Dark is specifically the wrong place to seek it out. There really is no story, as you’re almost immediately thrown into a world map and can choose different levels to play, each having their own rewards for a successful clear. Clearing the rituals of the various levels unlocks more of the world map, showing you things like shrines where you can unlock permanent upgrades at shrines. You also collect gear in the ritual stages and can upgrade those on the mini map using consumable resources you find, as well. Completing rituals gives you a small number of currencies, like soul coins and red crystals that you can use in meta progression that persists across all stages, like flat boosts to your damage, increased critical hit rate, or leveling up the skills you can choose during ritual stages.
Review Notes
If you’ve never played a Survivors-like or bullet heaven (depending on which genre descriptor is your favorite), these are games that tend to be less demanding in technical execution. You begin by choosing which type of character you’d like to play as, such as a barbarian or a hunter. You can select from a list of starting proficiencies called origins, which can determine what weapons and equipment you can get later on in your run. For example, if you want to start with a short bow and play a barbarian, you need to pick the Hunter’s Apprentice origin at the start. After that, you just move around and attack enemies that come at you in waves until time is up, escaping from danger using your single dash charge when needed.
Conquest Dark is one of those titles that starts with relatively low complexity. But as you clear more levels and unlock more bonuses, you can really branch out into different builds to conquer some of the more challenging ritual stages. As you level up, you’ll be able to pick from selections of power abilities, which can range from as simple as tossing a couple of axes to a huge area-of-effect slam that can damage whole hordes of skeletons at once.
You also can acquire new passives and movement abilities on level up and will find runes you can slot into those abilities to make them even more powerful. By killing mini bosses that appear at specific intervals, you’ll also acquire armor that can make your character more powerful or resilient, and the armor can even have higher rarities that will give you more and better passive abilities.
What’s really cool about the gear you find while killing mini bosses in the ritual stages is that the equipment actually shows up on your character. Obviously, you’re going to prioritize getting the right passives for your built or to increase your survivability during the level, but it’s neat that there are different helmets, boots, etc., that you can pick up which are visible on your character. A lot of bullet heaven games don’t even bother to do this, so seeing it here was much appreciated.
For some reason, there’s an option in settings to enable nudity. I don’t know why anyone would ever want to do that considering the characters look like they came from the PC title Black and White in 2001, but if you ever wanted to see a very polygonal man’s genitalia, now is your chance. This is honestly more a note for the parents out there who may have children who really enjoy Survivor-likes or bullet heavens.
Probably the largest difference between Conquest Dark and others in this genre is that you have multiple health bars and chances to survive being killed in one hit by monsters. Each time you die, however, your character starts bleeding, losing health at regular intervals proportional to how many times you’ve died and never goes away. This effectively means that careless play isn’t immediately punishing but can have consequences if you don’t invest enough into defensive abilities like health regeneration or increasing the chances for health pickups to spawn on enemy defeats. Also, as you lose health bars, you slowly change into a skeletal version of yourself, which really fits into the whole gothic, occult ritual theming of Conquest Dark.
TLDR
Conquest Dark is a simple game on the surface, but spending more hours with it will eventually reveal additional layers on the onion of complexity that is its design. The fact that getting one-shot by a boss or enemy swarm doesn’t immediately end your run but begins to rapidly drain your remaining health bars gives good value in defensive skills like health regeneration to counteract the life lost from bleed.
Of course, you can still focus entirely on damage and be fine, assuming you don’t get killed the first time. On top of this, the huge amount of build variety and things to grind for, like leveling up your powers, passives, movement skills, and runes, works well with the gear system that can provide you several extremely powerful effects. This is a great Survivors-like, and a sure-fire fit for anyone who even remotely appreciates the genre.