The release and popularity of Vampire Survivors has led to a sudden surge of games wishing to captures some of its audience. Conquer Humanity is one of those games, but instead of being a character simply trying to survivor hordes of enemies – you play as a villain that kills everything around you.

First impressions of the early access preview we received are rather rough. It’s quite clear by its basic and simple presentation that they’re working with a limited budget. Models and the world itself look like a quick mockup by someone who’s using standard Unity assets they found.

There’s also barely any settings to change at this point in development, but that’s not to say everything lacks detail. Fortunately, for a game that’s unapologetically about killing as many people as possible, gibs are solid and satisfying and there are some buildings around which provide a bit of a sandbox feel as you watch them crumble from the might of your powers.

In Conquer Humanity, you aren’t actually conquering mankind as the title would suggest, at least not in our preview build. Instead the game presents itself as a “simulation”, which would explain why you’re character can die multiple times within a run as you build up to get level 30.

The concept of leveling up doesn’t seem to have any impact in terms of abilities or upgrades players can get. Leveling seems more as a replacement of the timer that most games that unabashedly take from Vampire Survivors use. This works in Conquer Humanity as it’s a means to encourage players to hunt out people to kill, rather than try to survive for a specified amount of time.

I do wish, and hope, that the developers add something for the purposes of leveling up though. As of right now, the gameplay boils down to using the only available moves which aren’t locked away and are usable from the start. These moves range from shooting a laser, pulling people from afar, or just simply punching and kicking them to death.

All this leaves Conquer Humanity as a somewhat boring experience. Part of the charm in runs should be what will end up being different as a simple result of luck, yet here they all work out the same without me having to try.

It also ends up harming the experience with how challenging Conquer Humanity can get, even on the easiest difficulty, which is required to start with to unlock the harder ones. But unlike other games of this genre, which are hard at the start due to limited unlocks, there’s nothing to work for outside of improving skills.

And while a “git gud” argument could be made, there’s not really much in the way of “skill based” gameplay here either. All the abilities are simple in their usage, but dodging incoming damage is nigh impossible. Instead, you’re best bet is to run into as many people as you can to kill them, as that’s also the way to heal up any damage you’ve taken.

Conquer Humanity is a very rough experience in an already saturated market. It does have a decent twist on the formula by having players be the ones to fight hordes of people instead of being the one hunted down.

However, it’s lacking heavily in a lot of additional features that really bring out the fun for this survivor genre. This could leave most putting it down after a couple hours of gameplay. As such, it’s going to need a lot of things added by the time it hits Steam’s Early Access.

Conquer Humanity is expected to be launched on PC (via Steam) sometime in Q1 2023.