Vampire Survivors is such a recent phenomenon that a genre name for it, and the many games appearing in its wake, has yet to be agreed upon.

In fact, a lot of recent clones attempt to dress things up in ambiguous terms to pretend away the comparisons, saying things like “reverse bullet hell” and “survival game with rogue-like elements,” despite the games all obviously having much more in common with twin-stick shooters.

That’s the key differential here: these are games in which new abilities are stacked, each running on their own timers, firing off automatically.

So, with a hefty acknowledgement that Vampire Survivors wasn’t the first game to deliver these ingredients, and indeed you could quite reasonably trace its origins back to 1982's Robotron: 2084, let’s take a look at a selection of games to grab when you’ve finally tired of VS.

It’s not an enormous deviation from the Vampire Survivors format, but the tweaks it makes are interesting.

Next up are the spires that appear, requiring you kill a stated number of enemies within a circle around them.

However, given this is free, and the menus reveal a huge number of aspects that will be added in the full game, there’s good reason to stick this on your Wishlist and enjoy this as a demo build.

Then there are all the unlocks to pay for between runs, that allow you to start elaborating on the core game.

Presented in 3D with you controlling one of a large number of different types of robots, it fills the screen with an improbable number of 3D enemies, without slowing down even the teeniest bit.

The settings are bland, the enemies too few in type (although not in number), and the sense of progression far too slow.

The Early Access game has a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, and that’s with still a year to go on its development.

If you picked up Bardbarian today, you might be tempted to think of it as an ingenious crossover between Vampire Survivors and Plants Vs Zombies.

Then, gold gathered in each attempt can be spent to improve your units, the town’s defenses, and your hero’s core abilities.

It’s extraordinary that such a splendid, solid game should have faded into obscurity, not least when it put in place almost all the ingredients for 2022's format phenomenon.

It’s Vampire Survivors’ stripped down approach that, I suspect, is so vital to its enormous success.

(Although it would be remiss not to mention the Android’s Magic Survival at this point, given it came out before, and VS has so much in common with it.) But if you’re interested in a game that genuinely feels like an evolution of the concept, despite releasing so many years before, this is well worth grabbing.

While using the core concept of automatically fired attacks in top-down arenas with hordes of enemies, this grabs a giant handful of Slay The Spire in terms of shorter levels, progressed through on forking paths, and then makes it a team game with a clutch of Bardbarian.

There’s a lot to this, but it all slots together pretty intuitively, and for an Early Access game, it already feels incredibly complete and solid.

Here’s another game that precedes Vampire Survivors by a long while, in this case six years.

It feels a lot more like a traditional bullet hell arcade game in some ways, with flavors of Binding Of Isaac, not least with the detailed locations full of obstacles and items.

When I started writing this, I wasn’t expecting to find a game I liked more than Vampire Survivors.

The core game is familiar.