Vampire of the Sands

It's decent

I like it
pros
- fast paced, lots of stuff can be skipped/minmaxed, but you still have a lot to do
- hard enough to be challenging but not enough to be frustrating
cons
- not enough "official" super-hard objectives, so once you figure the game out, you need to come up with your own minigoals to keep it hard. the game has 8 levels, and doing all of them at once is pretty hard, but you only need to do 2 to beat the game, so realistically you just do the easiest 2 to speedrun it. I wish the game had modes that requires you to do 3, 4,...all 8. etc.

anyone who complains about bad controls in this game is just skill issued. the game feels nice once you get the hang of it, which doesn't take too long, it's pretty forgiving with frame buffers, so it's really more about speed and thinking than accuracy. once you nail the timing you can get results consistently.

I wish this was good but it's not, it's a nearly unplayable mess. Too bad.

Game doesn't explain its mechanics very well. Tutorial is 11 pages of text. Music is nice but from what I played it was very samey. Best part of the game is the pixel art.

I don't know for sure but this seems like something of a crappy mobile port. Low effort, low quality, and terrible combat. The audio either doesn't exist or doesn't work. Not worth a purchase in my opinion.

Very fast paced game and a really fun roguelite. I love the system were you need to learn mobs patttern, They are each unique and have different attacks. What makes this game so fun is the difficulty of the game! One small move and you're done for XD I would only recommend it for experience players.

When I first saw this game, I avoided picking it up because of a certain highly-rated review that described it as overly difficult and unfinished. Most of us rogue-lite fans have played amateurish games before and been disappointed, so it was easy to write this one off as yet another project where the developer released an abortive attempt once they'd become fed up with working on it. I let the game linger on my wishlist for at least a year, and probably several, before finally deciding to take the chance.

And I couldn't be happier that I got it. It isn't one of the best games of all time, but it's very fun and unique, and the fun / price ratio is extremely high. Far from being impossible, it's actually fairly easy to beat, especially with certain characters and runes. My first victory was after maybe around an hour of playing, and I'm not an expert gamer. But you can't rush into things haphazardly, and you also have to learn to adapt to a system that is unconventional in many different ways.

At it's heart, the gameplay and skill types are quite similar to old NES-era games. This is a game about memorizing enemy attack patterns, developing appropriate responses, learning the game's system (player attacks, items), and repeated precision control. Many action roguelites have arenas or boss rushes so that players can practice without having to work their way through a run, but in VoTS, you can practice in an arena against regular enemies. And it's a good idea to do so, since everything is deadly here.

But although everything is deadly, there is also always a strategy, and often it requires thinking outside the box, or taking approaches that you wouldn't normally use. For most bosses, you want to be decked out with the right items before you go after them, so the order that you proceed in a run depends on what you find along the way. Because of the soul system, you do tend to spend less time exploring, unlike most similar games.

What makes this game so fun is learning how to handle challenges that at first seem overwhelming. You start out learning to do basic things like time your attacks and dash-retreat, but this quickly becomes insufficient, and if you expect to be able to get far in a run with such basic techniques, then you'll fail repeatedly and get frustrated. Instead, you have to learn when to attack and when to ignore enemies, when to spam wand attacks and when to use invisibility to avoid encounters, what bosses to go after based on your items, and what to expect from dungeon layouts. To me, perhaps the highest joy of gaming is being confronted with a new system, and gradually learning how to use it and accomplish your goals. By that standard, VoTS is an _excellent_ game.

This game _does_ come across as low-production. The interface is clunky and sometimes awkward, and it's missing a lot of polish. Most of the time when I kill the final boss, it takes me a minute to determine whether I won or lost, since there's just a small text popup either way. There is no story, no tutorial, and I didn't see any way to tell how many coins runes cost. But the game has an enormous amount of heart, and the core mechanics are elegantly designed. In some ways, VoTS reminds me of some ARCEN games.

This is a game for players who enjoy learning new systems and won't qq when traditional approaches prove ineffective. I definitely recommend it.

Quite fun little game, good dynamics, nice music, perfect for 0.99 quid I've spent on it.
Would be a bit better if the hero's hitbox was increased in size a little bit for the loot drop collection.

Not really interested in playing a game that looks and plays like this, the random generation of rooms is interesting but the combat is just awful and unnecesarily hard while lacking anything to make the game exiting or fun at all.

I could understand making this a one hit kill game (or well, a 2 hit kill if you get protective items) if the combat system had mostly ranged attacks that allowed you to be tactical and play it safe, but not when:

A) Most of the game is forcing you on doing meelee combat with bad controls and bad hit detection!

B) The game makes you depend on RNGesus to give you good items or locations.

C) It also depends on you knowing how each enemy attacks when there is so many of them with different patterns and sometimes the attacks dont even get through! So you dont get enough time to learn how to fight them before they insta kill you.

D) It has a freaking time limit that forces you to rush head first into enemies making it easier to die, move too fast and reckless? die because the enemies crush you, be too careful and take your time? die too, because time limit!

This game is too frustrating to be worth any time investment on completing it worth the pain.

So, Let's start from beggining...
I grabed this game when the price was like 0,49$, I was bored and I desired a challenging rogue-like. VotS felt like a good choice... and It was a GOOD choice. While there are some cons, like: the weapon hitboxes are quite random, sometimes. One time you hit an enemy, another you miss.
While ignoring it you wil find this game really entertaining and fun. Its difficult but in a really good way. I saw a lot of complains that this game is too difficult, they are mostly overextended.
It's a fine piece of game, worth your money.

I picked up Vampire of the Sands while it was a part of the Black Shell Media roguelike bundle and finally got around to giving it a try. Unfortunately, it's one of the games in my library that I wish I never played. Even more unfortunate is that I want to like this game, but some frustrating design choices and bugs made the learning process not fun.

Pros:
+Art style is unique and engaging
+Skill-based combat with varied weapon styles and a dodge mechanic
+Several visually unique zones, and dozens of enemies
+Rune system is interesting and serves as a form of overall account progression usually not seen in traditional roguelikes
+Relatively short game lengths coupled with the boosts you get from runes mean that deaths don't set you back too much in terms of time spent playing, and the permadeath mechanic seems fair (or it would if the other game mechanics worked, but more on that below)

Cons:
-The hunger clock (or Soul clock if you're so inclined) is poorly implemented. It's a pretty standard and straightfoward clock: your Soul bar will deplete gradually as you play the game, and defeating enemies gives you a small number of souls. There are also soul "container" items similar to those in Dark Souls that provide you with a chunk of Souls immediately, and defeating branch bosses will always reward you with Souls. With the wealth of other difficulty mechanics at play (as well as the fact that VotS is a real-time game as opposed to a turn-based one where this particular type of clock tends to work better) I find it a little baffling that the devs decided to include a hunger clock at all. There are a lot of other directions the devs could have gone in when designing it, but unfortunately they played it safe and went with a relatively genre-standard variation that ends up not jiving well with the real-time pacing.

-The combat is clunky. To name a few gripes I have with it: weapon hitboxes can be very hit-or-miss with multiple enemies on screen, some weapon effects fail to trigger at all in combat (such as the Mace's knockback effect), and the dodge/tumble is just as likely to get you killed in combat as it is to save your life. The controls in general feel kind of clunky, especially movement.

-Difficulty. I'm no stranger to the roguelike genre (5 DCSS ascensions, 2 ADoM ascensions, thousands of combined hours in Brogue, ToME, IVAN, FTL, etc.) and games with steep learning curves can be some of the most rewarding to learn how to play. I don't really get that feeling with VotS though, mostly because it's hard to tell when you're playing well. This is a blanket problem with a lot of 1HP roguelikes due to the difficulty that comes along with balancing them, and when I was attempting to learn VotS I found myself being killed so often with so little explanation that it was hard to gauge if I was making any real progress. There were several times that I was killed by a mid-flight projectile the instant I loaded into a new branch, or a unique enemy would pop up onscreen and I would die a second later.

-Bugs with combat. Enemies would very frequently shoot off projectiles after they had disappeared from the screen, weapon hitboxes would phase through enemies seemingly randomly, weapons would occasionally only hit objects underneath enemies (monster spawns, traps, decorations, etc.) and deal no damage to the creature on top...the list goes on.


To summarize my above points, Vampire of the Sands is a conceptually interesting game that unfortunately is marred by a host of design and technical issues. If, despite all of this, you still want to give VotS a shot, I would highly recommend waiting until it drops under $1 again, because it just isn't worth $5 in its current state.


*NOTE: Review was edited for grammar and to expand on some of the listed cons

Roguelikes are notoriously tricky to balance. Even the most popular ones like Binding of Isaac are wildly all over the place, with some runs being cakewalks and others being an uphill struggle. What unites all the great ones, however, are those moments where fortune smiles upon you and that magical crossing of luck and skill delivers you a win. Vampire of the Sands has many of the parts to make these moments happen, and many more parts that will cruelly snatch them away.

I will say upfront that I'm a big fan of the premise. You've been resurrected by a necromancer to descend into dungeon beneath the desert and kill a vampire, who I guess is worse than having a practicing necromancer around. You pick one of four unfortunate revivees, each with a dramtically different playstyle, and then begin your descent into the subterrainean sands. The first of eight levels is desert-themed but the others stray into such territories as breweries, libraries, tech bases, and meatspace. The pixelly foes are equally bizarre, so prepared to get murdered by smiling beer bottles and angry sculptors over and over and over.

During your journey you'll find weapons that extend your attack reach, cloaks that take hits for you, masks that give you new abilities, scrolls, potions, wands, and more. There's also money to spend at shops, keys to open chests, and scrap to randomly craft new gear out of. Honestly there are so many items that you'll soon find your 16-slot inventory stuffed to bursting, and you'll need all of them to battle the denizens of the dungeon. Or you would, if you even had the remotest chance against them.

I keep coming back to the enemies because Vampire of the Sands is possibly the most vicious roguelike I've ever played, and I've played IVAN. What you need to understand about this game is that EVERYTHING is stacked against you. All of the classes in the game die in one hit, except for one that has literally no other advantages. Cloaks can take a hit for you but immediately break, and there are plenty of monsters in the game that can double-tap you (or triple, or quadruple if you find other forms of protection). Your masks that provide key bonuses break in a single hit as well. And don't expect to lean on your weapons, because they break in less than a dozen hits and leave you with your short, delayed melee attack that most enemies can outpace. Oh, and there's stamina too, which you can't attack or dodge without.

On top of all this is the soul system, which is a counter that counts down to your re-death. Since you're a reanimated abomination, you need souls to survive. The only way to get them is to kill enemies or find soul stones, so a slow and methodical approach to combat and exploration is right out. There are classes that mitigate some of these issues, but horribly handicap you in others. One character is fast but can't use potions, one has unlimited stamina but can't use weapons, and one doesn't need souls but can't use armor. The fourth character can take multiple hits but has no other advantages, so you still have to deal with slow movement, breaking weapons, and the countdown of death.

The end result is a game that's just too damn hard to find any fun in learning. If even one of the limiting systems were removed (one-hit kills or the soul countdown would be my vote) the game would still be hard but manageable, but this is ridiculous. My best runs have been ones that just bee-line for the bosses and cheese with unbalanced scrolls and masks. Most of the time I just get swarmed the moment I step onto any level other than the first and die. You can earn coins between runs to spend on Tetris-style runes that start you with advantages like items or new abilities, which is a good system for making overall progress. But it still isn't enough to mitigate the absolutely punishing difficulty, especially when so many runs end too soon to earn you any coins for runes.

You only need to beat 2 of the 8 bosses to enter the final dungeon, but of all the people who have played the game even once, only 17% have managed that feat. Think about that, 17% of people who TRIED to play the game could beat 2 bosses in one run. This is a game for the folks who managed the never-get-hit achievements in Binding of Isaac, and no one else. And even THOSE people are bound to be frustrated by the strange bugs that remain in the game (despite the developer's dogged efforts, at least). In the end, Vampire of the Sands is the most disappointing kind of game, the one that has a great premise, great style, and all the right parts, and then cranks up the difficulty to where virtually no one can enjoy it.



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This feels like a 60% developed game.

They've got the graphics and the basic mechanics, but there's no depth, no care, no love, no soul anywhere. No tutorial and no real explanation as to what the hell is going on. And the same friggin' 30 second sound loop playing ad nausea - the hallmark of a half-arsed game.

And it's got more bugs than a mound of termites. Go see the game's Community Hub > Discussions area to see how many people can't get this game working correctly - the developer doesn't seem particularly experienced and his response is typically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've got 150+ games and not one of them has my Windows taskbar floating over them when in fullscreen but this game does. Developer blames somebody else, the old ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ approach.

This game need a lot more love and attention if it is ever to amount to anything. I wish I refunded the second the mouse and game menu wouldn't work right off the bat. But I guess I own it now, I can only hope that the ongoing patching continues and eventually this thing becomes playable.

Its a fun dungeon crawler that can be of varied length depending on how many bosses you decide to tackle. you can take on all the bosses in the game and their levels (I think there is 10, maybe a few more), or you can settle for as little as 3 bosses completed and still finish the run. This game is also a real time hack n' slash rouguelike. It isnt turnbased, so even if you dont have all of the perks, the game is completeable on runs where your rune grid is not as upgraded. However the rune system while fun, needs a lot of work. The process of fitting runes into a grid to get permanent upgrades is insanely fun but the UI needs work. I think all runes are 3 coins, but new tiles are only 1 and there is nothing to indicated prices. There is also no way to preview the shape of a rune before you buy it which is a major drawback. While we are on the subject of drawbacks, the controls for the left analog stick movement get permanently stuck to the right and i know its not my controller. Going to the options and changing to control pad movement is a good enough solution for me though. Overall I had fun with this game. :-)

If you like Binding of Isaac, Magicka, and MMORPG skills then you will like this game :3
and dying alot ;-;

This game is amazing. It has so much depth to it, and so so much to explore and discover.
Every single run, I encounter a different enemy, or find a new Item, or see a new trap.
So much content.

NEGATIVES -

- the death animation for killing stuff isn't that good.
- And the controls are really difficult to get used to.
- There are some visual glitches that happen when you open your inventory, but
in no way it affects the game.
- when you are just getting used to it, it can be difficult to get through doorways as the hitbox is sort-of small.

POSITIVES -

- loads and loads of content, and stuff to explore.
- great level graphics, (if you love pixel graphics...)
- the Dash/Roll is very addicting and fun
- It's cheap
- randomized levels and many many bosses
- unique upgrade system, also fun to use :)
- very cool bosses and enemies

This game is not bad. personally i didn´t like it. Feels too repetetive and slow. I can´t really say that much about it because it´s not that much content in the game. I might play it again if i don´t have anything to do but only for a short amount of time. if you are considering on buying this game look at some gamplay first. 4.8/10

I could have sworn I already posted a review for this game but for whatever reason it's not here so here goes. I guess I would say this game is an "arpg" action roguelike playing game.The game wasn't ever in Early Access, which I believe would have help with alot of the initial bugs and gameplay problems but for whatever reason the game was released as a finished product. There was some trouble with controller support and a few other minor things but most have been patched. The dev listens and is working on the next patch as I'm writing this and it should be updated around the end of october 2015.

Ok so on to some gameplay mechanics, it definitely has permadeath and procedural level design but also has collectables (ruins) that enable you to add permanent bonuses of your choosing once you've collected enough coins. These "ruins" can drastically change the game and make your character much better and well equipped to handle this games harsh realities. There are cape's that act as armor and also have specific traits/bonuses. Plenty of weapons and throwables to mess around and kill things with. If you play on "hardcore" mode there is a mechanic called "soul level" that basically acts as a timer and goes down gradually. If you don't keep moving and collecting more "souls" then you will eventually die if your "soul level" reaches zero. There is a "ruin" you can get that does away with your hunger for "souls" but it takes up alot of your "ruin" inventory space.

The difficulty would turn alot of people off but the dev is adding a "normal" mode that does away with the "soul" mechanic altogether which is the way I prefer to play the game. Normal mode will allow players to experience all the game has to offer while making the game much more forgiving. As of now the game is 50% off so if you're interested in the game at all go ahead and get it cuz at $2.50 it's worth the gamble and worth it to support an indie developer. If you enjoy action roguelikes I recommend this game and believe it will only keep getting better with every update. So it's a super unique game with alot of cool aspects and a dev that is actively making the game better, definitely worth a look. ;)

Hard but rewarding. Don't let the playtime fool you, I got it in the past from itch.io.
A very fun, fast game. The practice mode is a good addition, be sure to use it before starting your real games.

Pro's:
- Fast
- Good looking (if the artstyle is your bag)
- Rewarding
- Runes!!!

Con's:
- Very hard monsters at times. Especially at the start.

A really tough, punishing rogue-like, that keeps you trying and trying again. For me, the visual style is perfect. Some really nice pixel-art in this one. Gameplay is pretty much like any other rogu-like, but in this one you can find runes, to add permenent customizeable stat boots.

I had some issues remapping the keys to a game pad on release, but the developers swooped in and squashed that bug right away. Also a small tutorial would be helpful, but it could also be a design choice to make you figure it out yourself. I really recommend this one, even at its regular price it would be worth a buy.

When the game released I was having issues remapping the controls and after posting about it on the forum I was contacted within the hour by one of the developers who genuinely seemed concerned about the issue. Not even a day later the game was updated and I was able to remap controls successfully. Mapping the diagonals directly isn't quite working yet, but it will accept UP + LEFT input as a northwest ( Using a Xbox 360 controller). Regardless, I was still impressed by how fast the developers responded to feedback. It wasn't until now that I realized that the numpad looks like the most comfortable way to play at the moment; I should have known better coming from an ADOM, Angband, Brogue, ect. background.

The game itself is somewhat simple but difficult roguelite that I felt had a good amount of content for what it was worth. The combat is a little bit on the clunkier side but I got used to it after a little bit and being able to actually defeat some of the more difficult enemies was satisfying.

I'd highly recommend playing Practice before actually diving in to the main game because it tells you what the controls are, otherwise you'll have to go in with trial and error or just looking at the menu.

I'm also a big fan of the classical guitar main track.