Vampire Survivors has a lot to answer for. The genre it has birthed is an easy target for indies because you only need a few assets and frames to make an engaging gameplay loop. Its somewhat less labour intensive than other genres. Now that the action roguelike is bloating, games have to distinguish themselves from others to stand out from the crowd. Space Mercenary Defense Force does this by taking the genre into space and adding a loadout positioning spin on things.
There are 9 ships to choose from in the game, although only one is available on first play and each ship has unique properties. Some are a bit larger than others but they’ll all have a different amount of modules and most will have a central turret. Modules are where weapon or defensive upgrades can be unlocked through levelling up your ship can be chosen and stored. Once you make a decision (and you are forced to – you cannot skip upgrades waiting for a perfect loadout) you need to decide where to place it. This is key because some weapons spray bullets straight ahead, some launch mines or exploding barrels behind and others are homing attacks. Since you’ll be flying away from hordes of aliens, you can easily ruin a run by placing weapons in unoptimised positions and that will cause you problems. Since you can’t sell anything, you are stuck and will have to soldier on.
The aim of the game is to survive a 20 minute alien onslaught. Various bosses will appear like a retro 2D shmup at time intervals and if you survive all 20 minutes, you’ll get a final boss battle at the end. The bosses conform to shoot em up norms. Avoid the bullet barrage and take them down over time. It adds a much needed closure to what often is an endless genre that can leave you unsatisfied. At least Space Mercenary Defense Force has a proper ending. The first completion then unlocks a celestial menu full of different game modifiers that make the game harder. If you complete the game with all the previous celestial modifiers on, you unlock the next one. For huge fans of the game, this is where hours of replayability can be found because a simple game can be cranked up to having the odds stacked very much against you. You’ll need to think on your feet and make good upgrade decisions to survive.
Upgrades are varied and interesting, along with the weapons. I enjoyed the humorous take on weapons at times. One is a mouse cursor clicking aliens to death. Another is a mouse cursor drawing a box for area damage. One is a hand grabbing an alien and throwing them at others. You can launch ice cream cones with each flavour dealing different status effects. Fire a birthday cake if you get them. Each weapon has its own upgrade path for increasing damage, speed and so on with some having branching paths for choices too. Weapons are also paired so if you have both on your ship, you’ll occasionally get synergy upgrades offered which are very powerful improvements. Alongside that you can upgrade your central turret as its own defined weapon and improve of alter the stats of your ship such as health, speed and size. Many of them are trade-offs so you might gain fire rate but lose movement speed for example, so you have to think about your choices. This is great for the first few hours as you discover all the different weapons and upgrades.
Where Space Mercenary Defense Force runs into some trouble though is that every run feels the same because it is the same. The same bosses appear every run at the same time, as do the very limited alien cannon fodder. The final boss is also quite easy to dispatch of too. Whilst your ship will be different, it often doesn’t feel that much different to play unless you make some really odd incompatible choices to make things very tough. As a result, this game does get a bit stale and it happened faster than I expected. The game initially is also very slow but after you complete it for the first time, turbo mode is unlocked. To be honest, this felt like every other games normal speed and I played in turbo mode every single time from there on out.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with Space Mercenary Defense Force. It has just largely been done before and done better. Fans of the Survivors genre will find nothing to get upset over here but its not a shining example of the genre either. I wished it had leaned into the charismatic silly weapons more to give the game more character and unique charm because that would give a gamer a reason to keep on playing. Adding things like space weather events, slot machines, coin flips and short side quests like guide the spaceship to the black hole are nice additions that break up the gameplay a little. I just feel like it needed to go further in that direction to embrace the crazy a bit more. As it is, this is Vampire Survivors in Space: Quick Edition. Your mileage will vary.
Review copy provided by the developer. PS5 version tested.
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