While I’m really bad at getting them covered the way I should, it’s because I adore these Survivor-like games so much that I can’t stop playing them long enough to put my thoughts on the page. Night Swarm is no different, as it seamlessly blends the Survivors genre and unlike the genre’s namesake, it’s actually about Vampires. Visually inspired by tabletop campaigns, Night Swarm puts its characters on little pedestals to look like painted minifigures and it’s got a really unique look. Can cool looking visuals make a game stand out in a sea of clones? Find out in our Night Swarm review!
Night Swarm
Developer: Fubu Games
Publisher: Mad Mushroom
Platforms: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X
Release Date: December 4, 2025
Price: $9.99
On the surface, I really wanted to love Night Swarm. The gameplay is super simple to pick up and play, as with all of these auto-shooters, you spend a majority of your gameplay time just running around and dashing occassionally. This means anyone can pick up and play, but there are some serious issues that hold Night Swarm back from being as good as it could be. One major concern is that the hitboxes seem to be slightly off, cause enemies will often damage you without actually coming in contact with Rodric which makes things frustrating since health pickups are randomly generated shrines that don’t appear on every stage.
Another issue is the lack of iframes, cause it is way too easy to get locked into an animation that you can’t dash out of, resulting in a good run coming to an immediate end due to a glitch in the collision detection. There are resurrection and super short invulnerability window perks you can buy in the skill tree which helps ease the frustration, but it happens often enough that you might not want to keep playing to get to the point where you can grind to fix what should already exist.
Night Swarm tries to capitalize on some of the best parts of other roguelikes in the genre – you build up the castle and save other Vampires, and in return they passively farm resources for you between runs. There’s a little bit of Hades, mixed in with the path progression to get to a boss like Slay the Spire, all with the basic gameplay loop of Vampire Survivors. It works, but the appeal for a lot of these games is their bite-sized approaches, and a full path run is upwards of 20 minutes in Night Swarm. If you successfully defeat a boss, you can drop into an endless mode that allows you to farm for resources on one seemlessly never ending stage, but without a map the inclusion of shrines being sprinkled across the map makes it feel rushed and unthoughtout.
Stage progression is made up of three scaling areas in each of the three biomes, and you’ll eventually progress into the enemy castle, but you’ll need to play for quite a while before you are strong enough to storm the gates. Each stage has three difficulties, and each of the difficulties comes with better rewards. There are four gear slots you can craft, but you won’t unlock the crown until you are able to breech the castle, so a majority of your initial run will be locked to boots, cloak, and cane. You can find blueprints while you fight, but there are also shrines that guarantee a blueprint if you’re doing well on gold in your run.
The problem with Night Swarm isn’t so much with what the game does, as it is, how much that it functions on the surface but doesn’t do anything exceptionally well. At the core, it’s a serviceable Survivors-like but it’s held together with Scotch Tape and Elmer’s Glue. As you play, you’ll find that the weapon system is pretty jank (though it’s nice you can forget a skill if you are given bad upgrade choices at level up) as some skills are considerably stronger than others. Blood Axe is easily the best attack you’ll find, while some weapons like the Blood Shotgun are seemingly worthless. Even fusing the skills can’t save several of them, as my strongest runs always centered around an upgraded Blood Axe/Frozen Ice fusion, Storm of Thorns, and the poison and fire rats. All three of those skills are better off as stand alone skills because their combined skills are trash and not worth skipping over passive upgrades to get.
Speaking of passives, there’s also an artifact system which grants you permanent bonuses for each run if you find them. These are always better than any other choice because you get the full power of their ability immediately. Scattered across levels are red shrines which upgrade active and passive skills, white shrines which give a guaranteed blueprint as mentioned earlier, a purple shrine which spawns an elite enemy that’s almost never worth your time since the resource gain is barely worth the effort, and a green shrine which will give you an artifact. This is always the best upgrade choice for your gold, and you should never buy red shrines unless you find yourself with an abundance of gold in a run. Pro-tip: Always stop and gather the gold when you mine it unless there’s a magnet on the stage, because you do not get enough time to go collect ungathered spoils at the end. Those ten seconds go super fast and sometimes the game will outright stop you at two seconds left to begin the ending animations.
There’s also companions that you can get that provide both a passive bonus for having them as well as an active skill that gives you a nice burst of bonus. There’s a mummy who gives you more magnet, a girl who gives you higher attack power, a plague doctor who increases your movement speed, and a small cast of others who increase dropped resources or grant passive cold/fire damage. The best companion is the guy who gives you increased cooldown because it makes your weapons attack so fast that everything melts while his buff is active, regardless of how much you’ve invested in passive attack damage upgrades.
The visuals are slick, but the game feels unoptimized (especially on the Steam Deck), and needs some patches to address performance issues. The music feels like it’s AI generated, as in some levels there’s a somber attempt at a haunting violin that sounds like generic stock music you’d hear in a TV version of a fancy restaurant, while in others there’s a sweet Trans-Siberian Orchestra sounding pseudo-metal jam that’s pretty cool and far surpasses every other piece on the soundtrack – it’s just too bad it sounds like someone told Suno to make a TSO + Electronica track. AI was also used to help voice some of the characters, which is super lazy considering the vast numbers of aspiring voice actors across socials who would likely have performed in this game for free just to get a credit on their resume.
At the end of the day, Night Swarm feels like a pie that someone baked just enough to look done but as soon as you put a fork to it and taste it, you find out just how underbaked it is. At the time of this review, Night Swarm is currently available to buy in a bundle with Soulstone Survivors, which is the perfect example of another game that was fun but jank at launch and has vastly improved since release. However, given some of the comments about developer Fubu Games previous effort Rogue Loops, it’s unlikely that there will be much post-launch support for Night Swarm, which is a shame cause it’s priced well for an indie, but it should be a lot better than it actually is. I think it could get there if the developer doesn’t give up on it and move to their next project, but for now, it’s passable at best.
Night Swarm was reviewed on PC using a code provided by Mad Mushroom. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Night Swarm is now available for PC (via STEAM), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X.
