Warhammer Survivors Review - Slaying a Billion Space Bugs BROKE My Brain

Dubious Dawn

14m

8 min read

It's another Survivors game! Yay?

Warhammer Survivors

11/10/26

PC/PS/XBOX/SWITCH

Auroch Digital

Written by Dubiously Difficult Dawn

From tactical RPGs to third-person shooters, the Warhammer franchise has come a very long way from its tabletop origins. It’s a natural fit for video games, with nearly 40 years of lore ripe for exploitation and self-contained stories that anyone can pick up and enjoy regardless of their familiarity with the franchise as a whole. Best of all, it’s quite a bit cheaper than buying the model kits…for now at least. So Warhammer Survivors is the kind of game that begs the question “What took so long?” as it is in theory both the perfect gateway into the Warhammer universe and the perfect fanservice for someone already familiar with it.

By now you’re probably familiar with the Survivors genre, and this game follows the formula to the letter. Pick your character from a colourful cast with their own unique quirks and starting perks, select a stage, and see how long you can last against waves of enemies out for your blood. Earn experience points to level up, acquire additional weapons and passive abilities to enhance your destructive capabilities, die anyway, and use that precious gold you gained along the way on permanent upgrades so you can come back stronger next time, and hopefully last a little longer. It’s simple, satisfying, and scary how much time can pass as you start “just one more run” even though you can’t remember if you ate breakfast this morning, and probably should get going if you want to make it to the bus stop on time, as a random and completely non-specific example.

There are a few notable differences that give Warhammer Survivors a little added flavour beyond its (ahem) coat of paint. The game has two campaigns, one for the grim, sci-fi Warhammer 40k universe, and the other for the high-fantasy and only slightly less grim Age of Sigmar, each with its own set of characters and stages. Most of these will of course need to be unlocked through accomplishing specific objectives, such as finding and rescuing characters trapped by encircling enemies in the stage, or picking up relics placed in the top corner of the map that takes about five in-game minutes to get to. It’s not the entirety of the Warhammer franchise, but it’s an excellent start, and for the price there is a surprisingly large amount of content packed in.

On the gameplay side of things, sometimes when you acquire a weapon it will be wielded by another character who will follow you around and use it for you: it’s quite difficult to wield two guns, a chainsaw, a giant sword, and a ballistic missile launcher all at the same time when you don’t have the ability to suddenly sprout additional hands to accommodate the extra baggage. It doesn’t change the way the weapon functions, but it’s quite fun leading a small army of soldiers firing laser rifles, or having a tank trailing along occasionally unleashing a barrage of cannon fire. Status effects are also one of the more noteworthy inclusions, and invite some interesting possibilities for combo attacks: what better way to take advantage of an enemy soaked in Nuln Oil than to set them on fire?

Of course your adversaries can and frequently do make use of these too, so it’s not entirely one-sided. I often felt as though they made better use of poison especially than I ever did. Enemy bosses also have their own unique talents, with some Orks capable of summoning giant feet from the sky (yes, you heard/read that correctly) to squish anything and everything underfoot, and others able to whip up their allies into a red-screened frenzy. This is not the kind of survivors game where you can stand still and watch as your foes dissolve into nothingness before they can reach you, which is a nice change of pace.

All of this is presented in a pixel-perfect package that makes Warhammer Survivors feel emblematic of the tabletop franchise that spawned it. Stages are bland and boring, but your characters and enemies pack in a surprising amount of detail, and the special effects are all delightful, even when they’re overwhelming your screen to the point that you can barely make out what is going on. You do have options to reduce flashing VFX and screenshake and disable blood entirely, but this sensory overload is only really a problem towards the end of a run, where the game decides to try and end your killing spree by throwing as many enemies at you as it can without crashing your system. It’s a tactic that usually works.

This is accompanied by a suitable blend of metal, rock, and dramatic orchestral soundtrack that assaults your eardrums with enthusiasm as you rush around the battlefield, vaporizing your foes and collecting their experience gems, which have been made into adorable little skulls. At first glance it’s a winning formula, and even if your first few runs will end in your grisly demise, that’s how these games work: you’ll take whatever you’ve learned and earned and come back stronger and smarter the next time. It makes that eventual victory all the sweeter when you’ve worked so hard for it, right?

But what I didn’t expect going into Warhammer Survivors was just how overwhelmingly grindy it was going to be, even by the standards of the genre. It makes every run a gruelling, miserable slog where the odds are often unfairly stacked against you or you stumble into victory through luck rather than skill and smart decision-making, and the reward for perseverance feels more like a punishment for daring to try and improve. At times it’s about as much fun as watching the paint dry on one of the model kits. Once you get past the presentation and start diving into the game itself, it’s not quite as much of a thrill ride as it looks to be.

The first problem is with your arsenal. Most of the weapons favour form over function, and fall into one of two camps. The first are the ones that only do damage in the direction you’re facing. In other Survivors games these would target the closest enemy automatically to make up for their more limited range, or give you greater freedom to aim with twin-stick shooter style gameplay. But in Warhammer Survivors you’ll need to be facing enemies to use these, which does not mesh well with the need to be constantly on the move to avoid being hit by enemies and projectiles. Aiming tiny bullets with pinpoint precision at equally tiny enemies makes for some unnecessarily awkward manoeuvring that will get you killed more often than not, as your target will just keep on walking straight into you.

The second type of weapons are the ones that attack a random enemy or small area, and I’m sure you can spot the problem with these already: when you have no control over what or where these will hit, you need to rely on luck instead of skill. These ones have the potential to break the game once they’re upgraded, but until they reach that coveted stage of power they’re often little more than added pyrotechnics that do more to distract you than actually help you survive: the screen gets busy enough as it is.

If you somehow last twenty-five minutes, your reward is a powerful Extremis boss. These colossal titans practically fill the screen, and even have a couple of lines of dialogue before your confrontation begins to emphasise their prestige. They’re a fitting end to your struggle...or would be if you didn’t need a very specific weapon to be able to damage them at all. If you don’t have that singular weakness, you’ll quickly be turned into a bloody smear on the floor, ending your run in yet another crushing defeat. It robs the moment of any sense of satisfaction and undermines player choice, as you will need to actively work towards getting that exact weapon if you want to defeat the boss at the end, better choices be damned. When your loadout is dictated largely by chance it adds another layer of potential frustration: you may not even see that fabled weapon at all. I also experienced a very odd and frustrating glitch with one Extremis boss when I had that weapon to hand where they would immediately teleport on top of me, killing me instantly. One of them also has a completely unavoidable instant death attack, which it will use entirely at random to end the fight right then and there, and can’t even be damaged for the first five minutes of the battle. Not very sporting.

But just getting to that point is a trial that feels more forced than necessary. Enemy strength scales very quickly as time ticks on, and leveling up your character is a slow and painful process that hits a sharp plateau around level 30. With slots for six weapons and passives, each with multiple tiers for upgrading, and a maximum of four choices to upgrade per level, the math doesn’t work out to allow for you to reach the required levels of power most of the time. Making smart decisions about which weapon or passive to upgrade as you play is denied you when your choices are determined entirely by RNG, again making this a game of luck rather than skill.

This could all be forgiven if the meta-progression gave you the means to make future runs more enjoyable, but Warhammer Survivors is reluctant to give you even an inch here either. The smallest bonuses are for the things that you desperately want and cost the most to acquire, and the largest bonuses are for things you don’t really care about and are mockingly cheap by comparison. You can refund your hard-earned gold at any time, which allows you to try out different builds as you work towards amassing enough wealth to eventually max out everything, but with the gains being so tiny it doesn’t feel worth putting only a single point into it. Especially when costs increase across the board each time you invest in anything at all. To add further insult to injury this element is separate for each campaign, so you’ll have to build up your gold in the same painful process for both of them.

All of this adds up to make playing Warhammer Survivors a very draining experience. To its credit it provides a genuine challenge when it all comes together, is beautifully presented, and has all the building blocks of that “just one more run” gameplay loop that makes the genre so compelling and addictive. Unfortunately it makes stages a painful slog with its poor weapon design, uneven power scaling, and meta-progression that fails to justify the effort you put into it. When there are so many competitors on the market it’s difficult to say if this is really worth the time investment for any but the most diehard (or should that be diecast?) of Warhammer fans, or those who are looking for a game that will force them to grind for hours to make any kind of progress.

It’s not a completely broken mess, and there is some fun to be had. But after a few hours you’ll realise that after all the effort you just put in, you’ll have saved up just enough gold for a 2% boost to experience points that won’t make the next run any more enjoyable. But you’ll probably do it anyway. Just one more run…until then, I am awarding Warhammer Survivors the Table Lamp of Mediocrity!

Pros:

Fantastic presentation with gorgeous pixel art
Provides a decent challenge even when it all comes together
Decent amount of content for the price point

Cons:

The grind is all-encompassing and never rewarding
Power scaling heavily favours enemies and feels more unbalanced than challenging most of the time
Bad weapon design makes gameplay frustrating and certain characters useless

Who it’s for: