One of the indie games that I’ve found the most fascinating to watch inspire other developers to try to emulate in this generation has been Vampire Survivors. What’s strange to me is that, on paper, when I first heard about it I was underwhelmed. As a huge twin-stick shooting fan, the thought of giving up my ability to aim independently, focusing pretty well only on dodging, felt like it would ruin the fun. The fact that the game so quickly then managed to suck me in, despite my reservations, was a testament to how well it was conceived and made. After playing through a pretty long string of games looking to tap into that same vibe, now including Submarine Survivor, it’s clear that replicating that success is a challenging task.

What Submarine Survivor does manage to do well, something that many fail at, is to at least differentiate itself a little. While it sticks to more restricted arena-like spaces, keeping the action more compact, it at least makes a serious attempt at making them feel different by including a wide variety of environmental hazards you’ll need to contend with on top of incoming enemies. Early on you’ll simply pick your poison as you get to know each of them, but the further you get this adds a strategic element as you may want to tackle ones you struggle with earlier in your runs to try to get them out of the way later.

That said, there are also areas where it feels like the developers threw their hands in the air like with meta progression, simply featuring too many muddled screens, currencies, and items. The thing is, pretty well all of it amounts to simply tweaking your stat percentages in specific areas, and outside of unlocking a few different subs nothing is clearly exciting or gives a sense of accomplishment to unlock. While the weapons you’ll use in your runs are at least a little more varied than lesser competition, the other modifiers you’ll choose from also feel overly stat-focused, and the rate you continue to level up can be a negative early on as it continuously interrupts the action.

All of that leaves Submarine Survivor somewhere above the average but still quite a long distance from the top of the pile. There’s thankfully a bit more depth here, and if you stick with it there will continue to be things to enhance and challenges to continue with for a while. That said, whether you’ll remain interested given the lack of really cool things to discover or unlock could be another matter. While it fares better than your average Vampire Survivors wannabe, it’s still unfortunately firmly trapped in its shadow.