Voltaire: The Vegan Vampire

A game that punishes you for doing the most basic of stuff isn’t my cup of tea. I want to love this game and bought it because of its co-op potential. Unfortunately, the game mechanics leave much to be desired.

I wanted to like this game. For a good long while I was on the fence as to whether to recommend it or not, because it is not a completely terrible game. But I landed on "do not recommend" for a few reasons. While the game does have a few good features, I feel like the "cons" far outweigh the pros, and the major sticking point for me was what seemed like a very poor sense of balance leading to the back half of the game becoming a tedious grind with not much reward. First of all, the pros: The game is very cute, with fun cartoony art, silly puns, and a lively if generic soundtrack. And its main draw (the reason I was so excited to play it) is an actually unique gameplay cycle that blends farming sim with tower defense. The closest analogue I could compare it to is Plants vs Zombies, which is a game I played on multiple platforms, so I was all for bringing that concept into three dimensions (the game is isometric) and adding the survival-esque urgency of needing to actually harvest crops in order to eat them and not starve. The game also claims to add "rogue-lite elements," which is about where my list of good qualities ends. While technically correct, since there is a category of upgrades that can be purchased that will persist across different playthroughs, the game doesn't really offer any reason to want to play it again. Once you've played enough to get the hang of it and build up a little buffer of materials, the game becomes trivially easy - to the point that in later biomes I was literally afk for several minutes each night waiting for the interminable waves of enemies to finish spawning/immediately dying to my defenses. With the exception of a notable difficulty spike against the penultimate boss, the base game mode relies on "make number bigger" for difficulty rather than any interesting mechanics or clever obstacles. In addition to the tedium in the latter half of the game, my gameplay experience was riddled with bugs. I experienced frequent crashes, as well as everything from bizarre graphical hauntings to confused monster uncles and obnoxious pinging crows. The bugs weren't quite bad enough to make the game unplayable altogether, but they were frequent enough that I have all but given up on the last achievement, since the game seems intent on preventing me from completing Boss Rush mode, and I can't bear the thought of spending another 20 hours slogging through Story Mode. Overall this is a game that had a good idea, but just didn't polish it nearly enough. The potential is there to do far more with it, like a more fully structured strict progression rather than random biomes with random weather. Barring that, even just a few minor tweaks/quality of life upgrades (such as mass crafting and the ability to skip straight to boss night in story mode) would have made the game vastly more enjoyable for me. I got this in a Humble Bundle so I don't feel like the few dollars I spent were wasted, but I do sort of wish I had my 26 hours back. It wouldn't be the worst game you could choose to play, but go in fully warned, and don't buy it at full price.

Idea is good honestly, the art style, etc, but the game has no depth, no meat, and the vamp being vegan doesn't justify it lol :p Unfortunately, it is only fun for like 3 hours, after that, it gets very repetitive with nothing else to do that prepare, more or less, for the night, and fight at night/

horrible balancing ruins an okay experience. away from the tutorial level you need to build your own towers, which is a huge chore. If you don't you'll have to spend 80% of your building farm plots on attacking crops rather than edible ones. Everything uses gems, which don't drop enough at all. every unlock, every shield barrier that actually makes the game playable, every craftable uses these, it feels like one of those idle games that purposefully make everything take longer to pad out the game. you also spend a lot of time min-maxing the game with chores like digging holes, in hope of finding some seeds that can spawn the gems i spoke of, which is of course random chance, because the chore wasn't obnoxious as is, spend 10 minutes around the map digging all plots, picking berries and trying to get the game to progress only for a quest to give you like 6 gems when a basic item or craftable takes 5. what really killed it for me and made me quit is just how awfully many enemies spawn, it just doesn't stop. i need to be at 5 places at once and if i have the audacity of leaving the main base for all but 2 whole seconds, i lose the whole night and have to spend 10 minutes digging freaking holes again.

The first couple of hours of this tower defense meets farming game are ok, but then quickly the realization of just how repetitive, badly balanced and buggy it actually is sets in. And don't get me started with how annoying it is to craft stuff and how everything in the gameplay just takes absolutely way too long. I guess it is to try and mask the fact about just how little content there actually is in this game. There would have to be a lot of love, content and quality of life improvements being poured more into this game to actually make it good. Works without any issues on Linux with Proton (9.0-4).

It has been three years since I last played this game, but I managed to pick it up quickly after starting a new save and then switching back to my old one. After spending a while battling enemies at night and tending to my crops at daytime I want to share my experience from playing as a vegan vampire. The game is relatively simple in what you have to do to make progress. While preparing for the next battle short quests appear to help you out on the way with XP, food or other stuff. Almost every action you take costs you hunger points, which increase until it reaches 100. Since you can only work until it is maxed out, logcially you want to keep it lower and feed yourself with the crops that hopefully are ripe by then. Some give you boosts to make it easier through the night. This game is probably my first experience with the "tower defense" genre in it and I am unsure wether I like it or not, but that is just personal preference. Part of me likes the excitement of the night with protecting the house, but at the same time I feel exhausted when in the meantime my crops get destroyed because I wasn't prepared to defend both at the same time. The game has several maps, which are all different, and some are harder to protect than others. Your goal remains the same: protect the house and your fields while picking up bonuses along the way to make life easier. As far as I can tell from my point of view, it is a fun game for a while.

I do not recommend this game. There is a part where you can unlock traits but you need a blue soul stone. There is not information anywhere on how to obtain this. You can't progress too much without unlocking traits. You start with one when you start the game.

I'm so sad to say this but I wouldn't recommend this game. It's too buggy as it is right now. I have a pretty high tolerance for grindy stuff and this 2D atmosphere and running-into-things-for-resources reminds me a lot of Wytchwood, which I loved. (And is honestly WAYYYY more grindy than this). But after eight hours of playtime, the game glitched, and the way it did it... with how there's not an in-game way of saving on another slot to go back a day... if I wanted to keep playing, I'd have to start a new game. I can't progress to the next area and going to night to get to the next day has just furthered the glitch into more weird ♥♥♥♥. Also after eight hours, I haven't gotten any more story. And that's a big difference between similar games. It feels like I was given exposition as a player for why these things are happening to have a set-up for the mechanics and actual gameplay. But there's no follow-up. If there IS more story later on, it's so much later that it feels poorly paced, at the very least. Based on other negative reviews, though, it kind of seems like there's not actually much storyline to this game. :( If you're really enamored with the idea of this game, get it on sale, but don't be surprised if it falls apart on you.

Cute concept and graphics but could not recommend. Game is grindy in ways that really make no sense, poorly set up mechanics with aspects of the game that should be simple are made obnoxiously hard for no reason and the game overall comes across as a poorly thought out badly executed attempt at being not like all the other games in same genre but failing badly at all of it.

Had fun with the first couple worlds, but got to fighting the final boss and got soft-locked. After defeating the boss and killing enemies for easily 10 min (normal round is like 2 min or so) I rage quit and will not be coming back. I have tried to clear the night twice and both times were the same result. The only option I see would be to completely restart the game and it's not worth it.