A novel new bullet-hell survivor game that has enough charm cooking in Early Access
Coming up with a new idea in a Vampire Survivors-esque genre can be difficult, but Wildkeepers Rising adds in an extra dynamic that may give something fresh. Instead of just picking up weapons, we capture monsters and use them alongside us in battle. As we go through different missions we can get these creatures and and build up teams.
So in effect they sort of become our weapons, each with specific elements and other abilities that can stack with items. Each creature has a special ability that gains over time as they’re doing damage and killing other monsters, and we can choose when to trigger them for attacks and effects. Some of them are defensive buffs that will give us shields, some of them may kind of clear out areas. It depends on what sort of creatures we have in our team and what we’re currently stacking.
My only real complaint is that it’s not really “capturing” the creatures as much as it is sort of showing up to a location on the map and adding them. It can feel like we’re tasked with discovering X-Creature and when we take on the mission and just stand in a spot five minutes to unlock them and take him into battles. So it’s kind of not really monster hunting or monster capturing; it’s kind of using them more as sort of custom weapons. This isn’t like a Pokemon game where I’m capturing something and raising them and making them stronger; it’s more about having access to a new creature so I can use them in this next battle.
But other than that point it is a very strong game in that genre. It’s still just one of these auto-survivor games, where we are still just surviving waves and waves of enemies. The addition of missions helps to break up the single track design. For example, we may need to go into a location and hold an area for a five minutes, or clear out specific monsters and head into a giant boss fight. So it kind of breaks things up into different styles.
The game also has a really nice, almost hand-drawn aesthetic that makes it feel a little bigger and more fleshed out, especially with all the different biomes. It’s in early access and it’s got a pretty strong foundation to start with, so hopefully the developers, Lioncode Games, can finesse some of the issues prior to its eventual launch.
This hot take early access review is based on a Steam code sent to the Editor by the Publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest for April 7, 2025. Images and video courtesy publisher.
No Comments