Grind Survivors – PS5 Review

Ever since Vampire Survivors took hold of the indie gaming scene, we’ve had a steady stream of imitators. Some good, some bad, but generally, as a genre, these games tend to be reasonably enjoyable. However, if there’s a downside to them, it’s that they can be kind of repetitive, dragging on for hours and hours as you slowly brute force your stats until you’re capable of beating the next level or boss. And sure, this can foster some degree of addictiveness, but it can leave you thinking that your time hasn’t been all that respected.

The thing here is that the developers, Pushka Studios (Slava Ukraini!), have finally said the quiet part out loud. The game is called Grind Survivors, and, oh my, is there some grinding involved.

If you’ve played this kind of thing before, you’ll know the score. You run around a large scrolling area (it might actually be infinitely scrolling, as we never saw a boundary) with the left stick while the game automatically aims and shoots for you (you can actually switch this to manual control, but, for sure, don’t do that).

Around you is an endless horde of enemies who will head directly towards you. Any contact will rob you of a little health and so the aim of the game here is to dodge them while staying close enough to still be able to deal damage. On top of that, you also have a very useful dodge move, and each of the game’s four playable characters has a special attack too (mapped to L2 but, again, just set it to auto-trigger every time it charges up).

As is typical of the genre, defeated enemies drop experience gems, and you’ll level up when you collect enough of these. That’ll throw you into an upgrade screen where you can pick a perk that’ll level up one of your many stats. If you’ve played this sort of thing, this is exactly what you’d expect from the upgrade system.

What’s a little less typical is how weapons work. During gameplay, you’ll pick up loads of them. Rifles, shotguns, lasers, swords, spinny blade things. Most of them will be too low-level for you to do much with, but you can combine five weapons of the same level (they can be different types) into one higher-level weapon. Five whites make a green, five greens make a blue and so on. That’s kind of cool, but also speaks to the grind, as you’ll likely have to play a level between three and five times to get enough weapons to make a decent one. And then you can gamble some money on improving it. This is pretty frustrating, but eventually you’ll end up with a gun decent enough to get you through the current stage (each one lasting twenty minutes before unlocking the next).

The emphasis here really is on just grinding it out. Keep playing until you’ve got enough money to level things up. But, fortunately, there’s still enough margin in there where skill can be enough to make the difference, and across the game’s fifteen stages, there’s not actually a whole lot of variation, and so you’ll occasionally find yourself beating one first time. And that can actually feel pretty good. The next level will smack you down, though as by then you’ll definitely need a new weapon.

It’s quite good fun though. The action feels pretty strong and dynamic; there’s a weight to gunplay and enough enemies running around to make it feel exciting. And it’s all backed up with a better-than-usual visual style that’s a step up from the usual basic graphics you sometimes get in this genre.

So there’s definitely a lot to like here. Holding your own against an army of enemies is always fun, but Grind Survivors just feels like a bit of a treadmill at times, and the other issue is that certain weapon types don’t work as well as others. We found that having the best shotgun possible was the way to make progress. Laser rifles, sawthrowers and SMGs always left us feeling behind the curve when it came to survivability. And so that kind of limits your play, with the only reason to experiment further being getting the ridiculously grindy trophies unlocked. However, after playing through all fifteen stages, we simply couldn’t be arsed going for the Platinum. Life’s too long (you saw what we said) to be playing games that don’t really respect your time.

It’s a shame, though, because this is a really good example of the genre, but it could have been one of the best if they’d focused on variety and excitement rather than making grinding such a big part of the experience. Grinding in games isn’t fun. It can be zen at times, but it’s never a great time, and here it just detracts from the overall experience.