Vampire Survivors took the world by storm when it first came out in 2022. I think it probably caused workforces across the world to see a dip in productivity for a short while. The only thing that could have made it any more addictive was if it somehow managed to shoehorn Pokémon into the mixture, right?
For those of you who never played it, Vampire Survivors sees players control a character that attacks automatically as you go up against waves of enemies. Survival is the key (as the name suggests); you've just got to last as long as possible. In PokéSurvivor, you do the same thing, except you just move a Pokémon through levels and attack other Pokémon.
There are 986 Pokémon in the game from all 9 regions, and the gameplay looks fast-paced and difficult. In many ways, it's like Pokémon Survivor Burst that I covered recently, except PokéSurvivor is a free-to-play browser game that you can play anytime on any device, with no ads. There's scope for online multiplayer, and apparently 38,000 people signed up to play on the first day alone!
From what I can gather so far, players take one of the starters from Kanto or Pikachu and play with them through the game, evolving them as they progress. Enemies seem to attack from all angles, like you're trapped in a game of Helldivers II, except this is top-down with retro-style sprites.
Credit: Game Freak/PokéSurvivor
I'm going to guess that this has been made using AI, though at this stage, I don't want to make an assumption as to how much has been used without speaking to the dev behind it first. There has been such an influx of browser-based Pokémon games at the minute that I'm thinking AI has to be a big factor in their creation. PokéDefense, a tower defence game that I wrote about this morning, is one of the most addictive browser games I've played in a long time; I just hope that it's not been entirely vibe-coded and has had some human element to it!
You can head to the PokéSurvivor website to sign up and start playing!
