Bring some friends to the end of the world
Bullet heaven games can already be fairly chaotic. Starting with Vampire Survivors, it's a genre that joyously fills your screen with thousands of enemies and tasks you with somehow killing them all before they reach your character in the centre. While Warhammer Survivors treads much of the same ground of Poncle's original, there is a small mechanical twist at its centre that adds a meaningful extra drip of chaos to the action.
Rather than control a single character, as you pick up weapons, you assemble a small squad, all of whom act independently of you.
You can see a little of this in the new Warhammer Survivors' trailer that announces two new characters, Arbites Vigilant and their cyber-mastiff.
"Arbites has a shotgun that is very close-range, it shoots in an arc," lead designer John O'Donnell tells me. "It's really good for clearing crowds of people, but it only shoots in one direction. But the cyber-mastiff has an orbiting weapon that's clearing up the enemies behind you." What complicates matters is that if you're playing as Arbites then you don't have a say in where his dog companion moves. "The direction of [the dog] is constantly changing, so you have to react to what your follower is doing."
The Cyber-mastiff isn't going to run all over the screen, it stays in a fairly tight box near your character, but it does give you something else to think about in combat Likewise, if Malum Caedo, the protagonist from Boltgun, joins your squad, you will need to work around his wandering and free shooting.
The squad mechanic, as well as tweaking the bullet heaven formula, is also born out of a lore need. "If you collect a weapon or you find a weapon in the world that's not conventionally carried by the character that you are [playing] right now you get an ally to join your party," O'Donnell explains. "So when you find the mechanical bite in the wild, then the cyber-mastiff shows up to wield that mechanical bite. So very quickly you start to have this little squad of Imperium characters that are running around the place fighting together."
From what I've played of the demo, the squad mechanic is easy to wrap your head around. You start each run by picking a single character who joins the game with a default weapon. Only your chosen character has a health bar, so you don't need to keep too close an eye on your squad as it expands. And you might pickup several weapons before you find one that brings in an ally.
Adding another touch to the chaos is Trooper Bartosz Kozlowski. While Space Marines are defined by their thick armour and powerful weapons, Kozlowski is an Imperial Guardsman, the cannon fodder of the Imperium. When you collect enough experience from felled enemies to level up, normally you would add power or projectiles to a weapon, but upgrading Kozlowski's lasgun sees more troopers join your squad, technically upping the weapon's power by simply adding more bodies to the screen. In one run, I'd Kozlowski, four other troopers, and a Malum pouring weapons fire at the Tyranid swarm attacking me.
I needed it, too, because the Tyranids don't just have strength of numbers, but boss units that buff all the xenomorphs on screen. "Tyranids have this hive mind mechanic that happens on the tabletop, happens in the lore, and also happens in Warhammer Survivors," O'Donnell says. "You find these big Tyranids coming along, driving the hordes of Termagants and Hormagaunts forward, making them more powerful, more bitey. The first time that happens is going to overrun a lot of players" – reader, they absolutely did swamp me the first time I ran into one – "But very quickly they're going to be like, 'I need to find the source of this synapse and deal with it.'"
Warhammer Survivors is split into two halves, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, the sci-fi and fantasy arms of the tabletop game. You can hop from one to the other between runs and both contain a completely separate set of heroes and weapons to unlock. In the demo, you'll face everyone's favourite nation of humanoid rats, The Skaven, who have their own unique faction mechanic: The Bell Of Doom. "It has a role in the tabletop of making the Skaven harder to kill," O'Donnell says. "And that's exactly what it does in Warhammer Survivors as well." Whenever you see the swarm is buffed you'll want to track down the bell and smash it.
I've only played an hour of the Warhammer Survivors demo so far, but it already feels like an adoring tribute to both Vampire Survivors and Warhammer. The pixel art is detailed and grungy, the power build in each run is a challenge to keep pace with, and the squad mechanic at its heart does bring something meaningfully new to the genre. It's not a drastic change, but it's something I feel could make a tactical difference if I can master it.