Enjoying the Creature Comforts of Wildkeepers Rising

Vampire Survivors-inspired games are abundant on Steam. As such, any new entry in the bullet heaven genre needs to inject at least one innovative hook. For Wildkeepers Rising, that means the integration of Guardians. After being collected, these wild creatures march alongside your Wildkeeper, dispensing a variety of useful abilities. As an Early Access title, Lioncode Games (Mech Armada) effort exposes a few balancing issues, with twenty-minute timed runs growing stagnant before the halfway mark. Yet, there’s also promise as you experiment with a variety of Guardian synergies.

Each run begins with your selected Keeper (currently there are three to select from) using either twin-stick controls or automatic attacks to cleave through increasingly dense throngs of enemies. Expectedly, your hero is underpowered at first with an insubstantial sword swing or slow arrow firing speed. Picking up resources dropped by defeated enemies provides access to one of four different perks every time you level up. On top of that, there is a trio of different materials that can be gathered for meta-game progression. But essentially, that’s the formula for every respectable bullet heaven title.

Rising’s missions steadily start with you gathering up to four guardians. Each time your character follows the waypoint marker to one of the floating emblems, you’re able to select one of three different creatures who will accompany you for the rest of the stage. Some like Grampth attract enemies before sporadically stomping on them.

Others like Murkle or Splizz are ranged fighters, following your keeper closely. Now, here’s the cool thing: you’ll occasionally earn perks that can be slotted into anyone’s two-slot inventory. And this is where Rising permits players to create some awesome builds. The Entanglement ability cloned one of my Guardians while Toxic Trail dropped damaging green goo behind each one, forming a poisonous powerhouse.

Although each Guardian is controller by the CPU, each has a special ability that can be triggered with button press. These range from creature dropping health power-ups, temporarily freezing time, or calling a Guardian to your location where they’ll body slam every adjacent adversary. These fast and frequent shifts between defensive evasion and frantic foe massacres are what gives Wildkeepers Rising distinction.

At present, Lioncode has Rising’s fundamentals in place, delivering engaging runs structured by missions that have you rescuing allies, eliminating elevated enemies, or just persisting for a prescribed length of time. The main drawback is the deficiency of distinctive venues and the need to grind given the inflationary meta-game prices. Fortunately, both of these blemishes are easy fixes, putting Wildkeepers Rising in a promising position as it heads toward a full release later this year.