Games Like Vampire Survivors That Aren't Just Clones

Vampire Survivors broke a piece of the indie market in 2022 and the aftershock is still going. Every storefront has a section called "if you liked Vampire Survivors" and every section is mostly trash—reskins, asset flips, mobile slop with the serial numbers filed off, occasionally a real game hiding in the pile.

So this is the curated version. Eight bullet heavens that share the DNA but actually went somewhere with it. Some are faster. Some are weirder. Some are doing things Vampire Survivors didn't even try. None of them are reskins.

I make a bullet heaven called Granny's Rampage and I have spent more time than is reasonable studying what makes the genre work. Here's the shortlist.

Brotato — the one that's faster and meaner

Brotato is what happens when you look at Vampire Survivors and think what if every run was four minutes long and the wave timer never let you breathe. You're a potato with up to six guns, the rounds are short and brutal, and the build space is wider than Vampire Survivors' because you can carry multiple weapons that scale independently.

Where Vampire Survivors is meditative, Brotato is panicked. You're making decisions every twenty seconds. The genre's slow build-up loop gets compressed into espresso shots.

If Vampire Survivors made you feel like a god, Brotato makes you feel like a god in a hurry.

Halls of Torment — the one that's secretly an ARPG

Halls of Torment is what you get when bullet heaven shakes hands with Diablo II. Same swarm structure, same auto-attack core, but the visual language is dungeon-crawler dark fantasy and the mechanics borrow heavily from ARPG tradition—specific item slots, character classes with proper kit identity, a sense of progression that feels less like a roguelike and more like an old Blizzard joint.

It also runs at the speed of a real ARPG, which is to say slower and more deliberate than Vampire Survivors. Some people love this. Some bounce. The audience for it is bigger than you'd think.

Death Must Die — the one with the cleanest combat feel

Death Must Die is the most polished bullet heaven on the market right now in terms of moment-to-moment feel. The dodge roll is responsive. The hit feedback is satisfying. The art is gorgeous in a way Vampire Survivors actively isn't.

Mechanically it adds active dodging—you're not just positioning, you're committing to dodge frames—which puts a sliver of bullet hell back into the bullet heaven formula. The hybrid lands beautifully.

If you wanted Vampire Survivors but with the production values of a mid-budget indie, this is the one.

20 Minutes Till Dawn — the one with the twin-stick

20 Minutes Till Dawn doesn't auto-attack. You aim. You shoot. The wave structure and the build crafting are pure Vampire Survivors but the verb is back in your hands, which changes the texture entirely.

Some bullet heaven purists hate this on principle. The whole point, they argue, is the auto-attack. Removing it makes the game a twin-stick shooter that happens to have a survivors-style upgrade tree. They're not wrong. But the result plays great and the build space is genuinely interesting, so the purity argument loses to "it's fun."

Magic Survival — the one that came first

Worth knowing for historical reasons. Magic Survival is a Korean mobile game that predates Vampire Survivors and arguably inspired it. The auto-attack-survive-and-upgrade loop existed there first, in a stripped-down mobile format, years before Poncle made the formula go nuclear.

Playing it feels like archaeology. You can see the bones of what Vampire Survivors became, in a less polished but equally compulsive form. If you want to understand where the genre came from, this is the artifact.

Soulstone Survivors — the one that wants to be an action RPG

Soulstone Survivors started in early access as a Vampire Survivors riff and grew into something more ambitious. The boss fights are real boss fights. The class system has real depth. The skill trees are nested in ways Vampire Survivors never attempted.

It's also messier than Vampire Survivors—more systems means more rough edges—but the ambition is the appeal. This is the game made by people who looked at the formula and asked what if we tried to actually make it deep.

Holocure — the one that's free and outshines half the paid market

Holocure is the free Hololive fan game that is somehow one of the best bullet heavens ever made. Free, polished, dense with content, charming if you're into the vtuber thing and tolerable if you're not. The fact that this is a fan project and outshines half the paid market is genuinely embarrassing for the rest of the field.

If you've been sleeping on it because the vtuber framing didn't appeal, the game itself doesn't really require knowing anything about its source material. It's just a good bullet heaven.

Yet Another Zombie Survivors — the one that's a squad game

YAZS does the wild thing of making Vampire Survivors a three-character squad game. You control one character at a time but the other two fight alongside you, each with their own builds and weapons. The party-management layer adds a strategy dimension the genre traditionally doesn't have.

It's also unfinished in early access shape, but the core conceit is strong enough to recommend on the bones alone.

Granny's Rampage — the one I'm making

Yeah, I'm including it. The hook is that you're an angry grandmother defending the neighborhood, the build space leans into domestic-weapon escalation (rolling pin, frying pan, flamethrower, things I can't tell you about yet), and the run structure is built around short, punchy sessions for people who don't have an hour to commit. Launching on Steam and itch for $2.99 in late June 2026, free demo before then.

I'm not going to pretend that's an objective recommendation. But if you've read this far, you know what you're getting.

What separates the real ones from the clones

The Vampire Survivors clone graveyard is enormous. Most of them die in early access, a few make it to release and flop, the worst ones populate the bottom of mobile storefronts forever. The thing that separates the games above from the dead ones is design conviction. Each one took the formula and pushed in a specific direction—faster, deeper, more polished, twin-stick, squad, ARPG—instead of just changing the sprite art.

If you're trying to spot a real one in the wild, that's the test. What did they actually change? If the answer is "graphics and waves," skip it. If the answer is something about the verb or the structure, give it a chance.

For the broader picture of where the genre is going, I covered the full landscape in bullet heaven games to watch in 2026, and the family tree of related subgenres lives in the complete guide to bullet hell subgenres.