HoloCure - Save the Fans!

Free games built around a fandom usually trade almost entirely on that fandom's goodwill. HoloCure doesn't need to lean on that goodwill nearly as hard as its premise suggests. Strip away the Hololive VTuber cast and the unofficial fan-game framing, and what's left is a Vampire Survivors-style bullet heaven that a huge number of reviewers — many explicitly stating they have no interest in or knowledge of VTubers — rank among the best the genre has produced. That's a real achievement for a game built by what began as essentially a solo passion project, and it's the reason a review of HoloCure can spend most of its time on mechanics rather than fan service.

A survivor-like that keeps asking something of you

The core loop will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played Vampire Survivors or its many imitators: move to dodge, let auto-firing weapons handle the killing, and choose upgrades as waves of enemies escalate around you. What repeatedly earns HoloCure comparisons to the very best of the genre is how differentiated its characters actually are. One widely-upvoted review makes the contrast explicit: many survivor-likes technically offer a large roster, but most of those characters "devolve into spamming the same overpowered build" with only cosmetic differences, where HoloCure's cast plays meaningfully differently from one another, backed by a late-game difficulty curve that keeps pressuring the player rather than letting an early build coast to an easy, repeatable clear. That combination — real build identity plus a curve that doesn't flatten out — is specifically what reviewers point to when placing it alongside Vampire Survivors and Brotato rather than the broader field of genre also-rans.

That said, the differentiation has a ceiling. A smaller but consistent thread in more measured reviews notes that once an efficient build is identified for a given character, subsequent runs with that same character start to feel solved, and that overall build variety, while genuinely above average for the genre, still isn't as deep as reviewers wish it were once the novelty of a first playthrough wears off.

The home base problem

HoloCure has spent two-plus years adding to itself well past what shipped at launch, and the biggest single addition — a home-base hub nicknamed "Holohouse," with farming, fishing and worker-management minigames layered around the core combat — is also the single most divisive thing about the current build. A large share of negative and mixed reviews describe this content as tedious busywork with little connection to why players came to the game in the first place; one reviewer frames it sharply, arguing that "more attention is poured into grindbox holohouse updates than the actual core game" and attributing that shift partly to a design incentive toward long-form content that streamers can spend hours grinding through on camera. Whether or not that specific motivation is accurate, the complaint about disproportionate development attention relative to player enjoyment is echoed across enough independent reviews to treat as a real, representative pattern rather than one person's pet peeve.

The sharpest specific target within that expanded content is a mandatory platforming section reviewers have nicknamed the "Tower of Suffering" — an explicit homage to (or copy of) Jump King, required for full achievement completion despite having essentially nothing to do with the survivor combat the rest of the game is built around. Criticism of this section is about as close to consensus as anything in this review's negative sample gets, with multiple reviewers objecting specifically to imprecise, hard-to-read platform geometry and to the decision to gate 100% completion behind a genre the base game never otherwise touches. Achievement data backs up how steep that gap really is: roughly 90% of players clear the game's early milestones, but full completion sits under 2%, a far larger drop-off than the core survivor loop's own difficulty would predict on its own.

A contested removal

A smaller but recurring thread in negative reviews concerns the removal of a previously playable character following her real-world departure from Hololive. A vocal minority of reviewers frame the decision as an unwelcome, politically-motivated removal of a fan-favorite rather than an ordinary content change, with at least one review describing it in explicitly harsh terms. This site has no way to independently adjudicate the underlying real-world dispute that led to it, and the developer's own reasoning for the removal isn't laid out in the patch history reviewed for this piece — worth noting as a live point of contention within the game's own community rather than either endorsing or dismissing the reviewers who raise it.

Free, and still being worked on

HoloCure has had a real, if unevenly paced, development history since its August 2023 release: launch-week hotfixes were followed by a substantial Update 0.7 in November 2024 (with several follow-up bug-fix passes the same month), leaderboard and balance changes in February 2025, and a developer blog post as recently as December 2025. That's a genuinely sustained commitment for a game the developer charges nothing for, and it's worth stating plainly: there's no premium currency, no cosmetic shop, no ads, and no purchase of any kind anywhere in the client. For a polished, deep, actively-updated bullet heaven, "completely free" is doing an enormous amount of work in this review's overall score.

Where it lands

Judged purely as a Vampire Survivors-like, HoloCure earns its reputation: real character identity, a difficulty curve that keeps asking something of the player, Steam Deck support from day one, and a price tag of zero. The Holohouse content and the Tower of Suffering are real, specific, well-documented missteps that have made "100% completion" a much less appealing goal than "beat the core game," and the contested character removal remains a live sore point for part of the community. None of that changes what the base survivor loop actually is — one of the stronger entries the genre has produced, wrapped in a fan-game premise that turns out to need the fandom a lot less than expected.