Vampire Survivors took the gaming world by storm just a couple years ago, and since then there have been a large number of titles with a similar style, with many dubbing the genre bullet heaven. It’s one of those instances where Vampire Survivors didn’t do it first, but it became really popular because it was filled with great music, delightful visuals, and a strong gameplay loop. Artifact Seeker: Resurrection builds off the Survivors-style approach to bullet heavens, allowing you to choose your own routes through a map with bite sized combat stages and event interactions to find rare artifacts, hence the name. So, is Artifact Seeker: Resurrection a title you should seek out, or should this be lost for good? Let’s find out.
What sets Artifact Seeker: Resurrection apart from all of the usual Vampire Survivors-type games is that you progress through a world map and are on battle stages for just one to about three minutes at a time. Your total adventure across three different maps will generally take around 30 minutes total, but you actually feel like you’re progressing toward a conclusion as you pick what paths you want to take on the map. The in-combat gameplay is functionally similar, and your spells are cast automatically to tear through ever-spawning enemies while you try to avoid being overrun by them or getting hit by their projectiles. Thankfully, you have access to a dodge roll and a special attack that you can use to avoid being swarmed by baddies.
As things stand right now, players progress through three different overworld maps with a variety of different nodes. There are combat nodes, which play like your traditional bullet heaven-style gameplay where enemies throw themselves at you in desperate hopes of damaging you. Elite enemy nodes are very similar to the former, but they’ll also have much tougher enemies throw themselves at you that may require that you dodge more regularly or use your special attack to keep yourself safe. Thankfully, for your trouble, these elite packs typically drop artifacts that you can select and use once the encounter is over.
Players can also find treasure spaces that will just give you an artifact from a pool of three different options, as well as campfire spaces that give you a moment to buy spells or new artifacts, reroll affixes on the artifacts you already have, or even sell artifacts you’ve acquired to fund the purchase of an artifact or spell that might work better with your current character build.
There are also tons of event spaces, which will play a little story for you to enjoy or show you something interesting, and then will propose a choice to the player. What you choose will affect your character and your future gameplay. Sometimes, you may lose a bunch of health, other times you may get locked into combat. But in most event instances, depending on the individual stats of your character, you can score a unique and powerful artifact that won’t normally show up in the shop.
As you level up and acquire new artifacts, your stats will increase (or decrease) accordingly. Leveling up allows you to choose new spells or increase the level of spells you’ve already learned. There’s actually quite the variety of different spells in Artifact Seeker: Resurrection as you can focus on specific elements, concentrate on close or long-range attacks, or even make a pet build so you can get creatures to kill things for you. Due to the flexibility of the various spells, artifacts, and roguelite meta progression systems, you can really focus on creating specific builds that can absolutely rip Artifact Seeker apart even on its maximum difficulty settings!
It’s pretty easy to make builds in Artifact Seeker, especially once you start understanding the mechanics. Even a light grasp of all the numbers and keywords floating around on screen will help you effectively never lose a run again, which could make this one of the easier Vampire Survivor type games in which you get your first clear quickly. There are loads of synergies that get activated as you find spells and artifacts that match them, and all of these synergies power up your character in some way. For example, wind synergy increases your attack power with wind spells as well as your movement speed. Or, if you’re predominantly using ice spells, you’re going to want to pick up ice-boosting artifacts at shops or any other time they’re presented.
One of the major weak links in Artifact Seeker: Resurrection is that the user interface is crazy. Hovering over nearly anything will cause huge fly out windows to pop up on screen with a bunch of numbers you probably won’t even understand, especially when you first start playing. Everything you may want to know is available to you at any time by hovering over your spells or your artifacts. Want to know what bonuses you get from reaching Dark Synergy level 7? Well, the window shows you, but if you don’t know that’s what you’re looking at, it’s especially overwhelming. Thankfully, reviewing your spells is pretty simple as you can see an outright damage per second stat for your spells during or after any given combat stage, which can help you determine which of your spells isn’t quite meshing with your synergies and artifacts for your current run.
The meta progression is also pretty impressive, as you’re given a whole lot of things to spend your reward funds on after a successful clear of Artifact Seeker: Resurrection. You can build new facilities to unlock many, many things, from new characters to different weapons that give you different passive bonuses and starting spells for your chosen characters. You do also have standard meta progression like permanently increasing your crit chance or attacking stats, but then you’ve got the wacky Wheel of Stars that lets you customize a star chart to gain even more passive bonuses to your character and starting spells, which further aids in specializing your builds.
Visually, Artifact Seeker: Resurrection looks fine. The 3D character models are pretty simplistic, and some may be off model compared to the higher quality 2D art assets, but there shouldn’t be many instances where the player can’t tell what’s going on due to the quality of the visuals. These kinds of games aren’t usually known for their graphics, and what Artifact Seeker offers is good enough to get the point across from a small team of developers.
All in all, Artifact Seeker: Resurrection is an excellent bullet heaven game with loads of customization, especially in comparison to its peers. There are many viable builds, and it thoroughly rewards players who engage with all of the varying mechanics and meta progression to increase specialization and their favorite builds. There’s also a great number of characters to choose from, all with their own passive abilities. If you have enjoyed titles like Soulstone Survivors, Vampire Survivors, Death Must Die, and similar, there’s likely a lot you’ll enjoy in Artifact Seeker: Resurrection.