Achilles Survivor Review – An Excellent Survivors-like

The rise of the arena shooter slash auto shooter slash Survivors-like genre has been on the up and up since we saw games like Vampire survivors and Brotato capture audiences attentions in 2022. Side note: we need to decide on a name for the genre, somebody get on that. Achilles Survivor is the latest game to try its hand at this gameplay style, drawing on both greek mythology and Achilles Legends Untold, an RPG sharing the same world released in 2023 and developed by the same studio. Upon first looking at Achilles Survivor, you might think that it has the visuals of Titan Quest combined with the gameplay of Vampire Survivors, but it’s much deeper than that. So, join me as we review the pros and cons of Achilles Survivors and give it a score out of 10 at the end. 

With Achilles Survivor, Dark Point Games have taken the world of their 2023 role playing game, Achilles Legends Untold, which is based around Achilles, the Trojan War, and Greek mythology in general, and turned it into a Survivors-like game. When I first heard about this, I wondered if the previous game would stop Survivors feeling like a unique concept, especially when its visuals, on the face of it, look like other genre classics, like Titan Quest. But, fear not; I was pleasantly surprised to find that you don’t need any previous knowledge or experience of Legends Untold to enjoy Survivors. 

At its core level, this game is no different from something like Vampire Survivors. You start off controlling Achilles during the siege of Troy, and you have to fight hordes of creatures and enemies that you’d expect to find in all of the ancient Greek tales – skeletons, cyclopses, spiders, and more. You start off with a basic attack, and each enemy you slay will drop XP gems that level you up. Each time you gain a new level, you can pick one new power or upgrade from a choice of four. These new powers range from Shield Throw, which throws a bronze shield that bounces between enemies before returning like a boomerang, to Chimera Spikes, which launches a fan of spikes at enemies in front of you. Those are just two of many new powers, but they are all varied in their abilities to allow for you to adapt them based on your playstyle – some do heavy damage to a single target, while some do DOT in an area around you. 

As you play through the game, you’ll unlock new characters by completing achievements, and these new characters bring new core powers and play styles. For example, killing a bunch of skeletons will unlock Tartarus, who has slow movement but leaves a large poison pool around him that does damage over time. I won’t go over any more for fear of spoilers, but there are 11 unlockable characters in total, each with unique base stats like damage, health, movement speed, and so on. 

Speaking of unlocking things, Achilles Survivor is split into Realms, which are basically campaigns, and each of these Realms has around 5 Locations to play. These are the game’s version of levels. All you have to do is survive for 20 minutes in the level, and you successfully complete that location and unlock the next one. I know I know, so far Achilles Survivors is sounding very much like Vampire Survivors, but it does have some unique gameplay aspects that make it unique.

Dotted around each level are icons on the floor that allow you to construct different buildings by standing in their radius. Mines, for example, will auto-construct if you stand next to their icon long enough. Once constructed, simply stay near them and you will be given stone over time until the mine runs out of materials. You can then take the stone you’ve gathered and go to other icons on your map that don’t yet have a pre-made building on them. When you enter these areas, the game gives you a choice of what to build there. You can choose turrets to help you take out the increasing swarms of enemies. You can choose health stations that heal you. Or you can construct a barracks that spawns myrmidons that come to help you fight. The map is absolutely littered with places to construct these buildings, and each one you construct not only helps you fight enemies but gives you a passive buff to things like your damage, armour, or health. These buildings, however, can be destroyed, and you have limited materials to work with, so choosing where, when, and what to construct adds an engaging, strategic element to Achilles Survivors that isn’t found in similar games. 

Completing the game’s levels also involves a little more than simply surviving the allotted time. I mean, while that is certainly a strategy you can take, you will also be missing out on lots of resources and XP. As you play, portals and basements doors to the underworld will open up across the map. By tracking them down and defeating the enemies that have spawned from them, you’ll gain currencies like obols. These can be used on the game’s main menu to unlock what Achilles Survivor calls “favours”. These are passive buffs that give your character more health, more damage, increased XP gain, and more. These buffs also carry across all characters, which is a nice touch that removes a lot of grinding. The last thing to talk about when it comes to the game’s moment-to-moment gameplay is that it will periodically spawn boss enemies that have a health bar. They chase you around the map and can spawn at random times, adding a bit more tension to the gameplay. There are also heroic bosses that spawn in some levels, like Hector for example. They have a gigantic health bar, special abilities, and are much tougher to take down than standard bosses. 

We can’t really talk any more about Achilles Survivors without discussing the fact that it is an early access release. There are currently only 2 campaigns of 5 levels to play through, but there are more set to come in the future. This is probably the most disappointing aspect of the game right now, because everything on offer plays like a polished, full finished experience – it’s just simply missing the meat of its gameplay. There are currently 11 characters, and while Dark Point Games have said they will add more, 11 is more than enough variety to keep you occupied for now. But more on how early access affects things in a bit.

There’s no doubt that Vampire Survivors is the gold standard when it comes to this genre, and we’re not just talking about gameplay. It has interesting lore pickups and a fully fleshed out original world that makes you want to find out more. Achilles Survivors has the benefit of being based on Greek mythology, which is a great theme if you’re into the ancient classics, but it doesn’t leave a lot of room for innovation. Unlike Vampire Survivors, there is no logbook or journal detailing quests, characters, enemies, or side missions – your sole goal is to survive for 20 minutes. You don’t even have to close the rifts that spawn if you don’t want to – just simply turtle up next to your turrets. The flip side to this, of course, is that Achilles Survivors has more of a base building element to its gameplay. What you build and where matters, and creating a perimeter of towers that set enemies alight can be a strong and satisfying tactic. So it’s much more about strategy than exploration in that sense. However, the early access elephant in the room means that Achilles Survivors is pretty barebones in every other area: there is no tutorial or tooltips to explain gameplay, currencies, or well, anything. You really need to be familiar with the Survivors-like genre to understand how to play.