Wildkeepers Rising

Introduction

Wildkeepers Rising takes the Vampire Survivors formula and reworks its core hook: instead of collecting and upgrading weapons directly, the player recruits and levels up a team of creature companions who do most of the fighting. Developed and published by Lioncode Games, it spent seven months in Early Access from March 2025 before reaching a 1.0 full release on 23 October 2025 per Steam's own listing. It holds a Very Positive rating — 83.8% across 74 English-language reviews, 80.8% across its wider 125-review all-language corpus. This review reads all 12 of the game's English negative reviews and applies this outlet's standing practice for ex-Early-Access titles: dating every complaint against the 1.0 release date rather than treating the whole negative sample as describing today's game.

Most of the criticism describes a game that no longer exists

Nine of the 12 negative reviews read for this piece predate 23 October 2025, several by six months or more. That matters specifically here because Wildkeepers Rising's Early Access period wasn't quiet — Steam's news feed shows an Endless Mode and Accessibility update on 11 May 2025, a new playable character in April, and what the developer itself titled "Our Biggest Update Yet" on 30 June 2025, all landing before those older reviews' complaints would have been addressed. A March 2025 review calling the game's creature-partner mechanic "poorly executed" and an April review describing "incredibly shallow in-run progression" with upgrades stopping after level 10 are both describing a build from the game's first month, not the game as it stands today. This review reports those complaints as real and specific at the time they were written, without treating them as current facts about the finished release.

The complaint that survived, confirmed from an unlikely source

Only three of this review's 12 negatives postdate the 1.0 release, which on its own might suggest Early Access ironed out the game's real problems. What complicates that reading is a specific, credible corroboration from inside the positive sample. A 22-vote review, posted 3 November 2025 — after 1.0 — recommends the game overall but states directly: "The first 30-60 minutes feel awful. Hitboxes are very bad, and since you're using (up to) 4 minions as your primary source of damage, who you can't direc[tly control]..." That's not a negative review making the claim, which might be read as one frustrated player's outlier experience — it's a thumbs-up conceding a real, specific technical problem while still recommending the game overall. That combination is worth taking seriously: the opening stretch appears to remain rough even for players who end up enjoying the game as a whole.

A separate structural complaint, raised in one of the three genuine post-1.0 negatives, concerns creature death and respawn cooldowns: as difficulty increases, losing a creature companion costs more relative time before it returns, compounding disadvantage during exactly the stretch of a run where players can least afford it. That's a specific design critique distinct from the hitbox issue above, and one this review has no way to independently verify beyond the single review raising it.

A short game for some

A milder complaint appears from inside the positive sample rather than the negative one: a post-1.0 review reports beating "everything in 6 hours," a length concern worth weighing against the game's NZ$21.99 price for readers specifically seeking a long-term content sink. Steam's broader achievement data suggests more depth exists for committed players than that single account implies — 104 tracked achievements with a median completion rate of 17.8% points to a real spread of difficulty and challenge beyond a short main loop — but the specific "beat it in 6 hours" complaint is worth reporting as one genuine data point regardless.

Final Verdict

Wildkeepers Rising is a genuine creature-collecting twist on a crowded genre, and this review's dating discipline finds that most of the criticism attached to its Steam page describes a build substantially reworked since March 2025 rather than the game a buyer receives today. What remains real and worth knowing: a rough opening 30 to 60 minutes that at least one enthusiastic, recommending player specifically flags as unresolved, a creature-cooldown design choice one reviewer argues compounds unfairly at higher difficulty, and a content ceiling some players reach faster than the asking price might suggest. None of that undoes a genuinely distinctive, well-supported entry in the survivors-like genre — but readers weighing the game's older, harsher reviews should know they're largely reading history rather than a live account of what ships today.