Swordmancy

The bullet-heaven genre that Vampire Survivors popularised has become one of the most crowded corners of Steam's new-release feed, which makes it genuinely hard for a solo developer's entry to stand out on premise alone. Swordmancy's angle is giving its upgrades a bit of character: you play a Swordmancer commanding living weapons rather than simply wielding bigger numbers, and that framing carries through to how those weapons grow.

The loop, and its one real twist

The moment-to-moment structure will be instantly familiar to anyone who's played this genre before: survive an escalating swarm, gain experience automatically, and choose one of three random upgrades every time you level up. Swordmancy's variation is that weapons pushed to level eight can evolve into a stronger form rather than just stacking another flat bonus, which is a small but real point of difference from the genre's usual pure-stacking approach. Defeating bosses, completing in-run events and evolving weapons all feed into unlocking more characters, weapons and upgrades for future runs — a meta-progression loop that gives a completed run something to show for itself beyond the run itself.

An unusually large roster for day two

What stands out most from the store page is scope. Ten highlighted unlockable characters are visible before you've played a single run, and the game already ships with 57 Steam achievements — a level of built-out content structure that a lot of day-one Early Access releases don't bother with. For a genre that lives and dies on how much there is to chase after the core loop stops feeling new, that's a meaningfully positive sign about how much of the game actually exists behind the initial impression, even if this review can't yet confirm how well any individual piece of it plays.

What's genuinely unknown right now

This is where a first look has to be honest about its limits. Swordmancy launched into Early Access two days before this was written, and it currently has zero Steam reviews — no player sentiment to check against, no bug reports to flag, no achievement-completion curve to show where runs tend to end. The store page describes the systems clearly enough to write about with confidence, but it doesn't say how long a full run takes, how quickly the difficulty ramps, or whether the roster's variety holds up once you're deep into unlocking it rather than looking at character portraits on a store page. Those are the questions that actually decide whether a survivor-like earns a place next to Vampire Survivors and Brotato in someone's library, and they're not answerable yet.

Final verdict

Swordmancy's living-weapon evolutions and its unusually large day-one roster make it worth a free download's worth of curiosity, and a solo developer shipping 57 achievements' worth of structure on day one deserves credit for ambition. Six and a half reflects real promise sitting on top of real uncertainty — there's no cost to finding out where it lands, but this is a wishlist-and-revisit recommendation rather than a confident buy, if only because there's nothing yet to buy and no community feedback yet to weigh against the pitch.

Price and Early Access status checked 5 August 2026.

If you'd rather your character progression persisted across sessions in a slower-paced, walkable world than reset every run, Wanderer takes that approach instead.