Dungeon Survivors

Introduction

Dungeon Survivors takes the Vampire Survivors formula — fight endless waves, pick an upgrade after each one, keep going until you die or the run ends — and builds it specifically around online co-op for up to four players. TopVR developed and self-published it, releasing on 23 February 2024. Reading the full available negative sample of 25 English-language reviews alongside the top positives, out of a Mostly Positive corpus (roughly 71.9% across 89 reviews), finds a small, cheap game whose real appeal is squarely social, sitting next to a specific, well-corroborated mechanical problem that several independent reviewers tested and reported the same way.

Co-op is the actual pitch

Reviewers across the sample largely agree on what makes Dungeon Survivors worth its low price: the company. Multiple reviewers specifically frame it as significantly more enjoyable played with friends than solo, with one describing the loop as "hard to do alone" and gets "boring quickly," and another framing the whole game as "Vampire Survivors but... Online!" One dedicated player logged close to 100 hours building different stat combinations and fighting the game's bosses, describing "cool bosses with some fun mechanics" alongside a decent range of weapon and armour models — evidence there's at least a reasonable amount of content for players who click with the format.

Stat bonuses that don't do what they say

The most consistent, specific and genuinely striking complaint in the negative sample concerns whether the game's upgrade system actually functions as described. Multiple independent reviewers report testing this directly rather than just guessing: one described a "40% healing" upgrade that changed healing per hit from 14 to 14 — no change at all — while another reported the same +40% healing upgrade only moving their healing from 9 to 10 points, nowhere near the advertised proportion. A third reviewer described stacking dodge chance well past 100% total and still being hit consistently. These aren't vague "the game feels unbalanced" complaints; they're specific, independently reproduced tests of the same mechanic arriving at the same conclusion, which gives this particular criticism unusual weight for a corpus this size. One reviewer summed up the broader implication plainly: the game "plays like a tech demo without understanding what makes a Survivors game fun" — a specific charge about depth rather than a generic dismissal.

Passive combat and thin progression

A related, softer complaint concerns how much the core combat actually asks of the player. Several reviewers describe enemies approaching in simple, predictable lines, with higher difficulty settings amounting mostly to bigger numbers rather than smarter or more varied threats. Character growth across a run draws its own specific criticism as barely perceptible, which compounds the stat-bonus problem above rather than compensating for it — if upgrades don't do much and enemies don't get more interesting, the moment-to-moment loop has less to hold attention than the genre's best examples. Music is a smaller, more consistently repeated complaint, described across multiple reviews as droning and repetitive over longer sessions.

Final Verdict

Dungeon Survivors is a functional, cheap way to spend an evening fighting waves alongside friends, and that's genuinely where its review base finds the most value in it — several reviewers say plainly the game is meaningfully better in a group than played alone. Where it falls short is everything the genre's better entries get right underneath that social layer: a specific, independently verified bug in how percentage stat bonuses apply, passive combat that doesn't escalate meaningfully, and progression several reviewers describe as barely noticeable. At its low price, it's defensible as a co-op time-waster with friends; on its own systemic merits, this review's sample suggests there isn't much holding it up.