In Hollow Survivors, players take on the role of Hollow, one of a group of horned people who live in a small village at the base of a tower. In this tower live the Soulbinders, an evil group who use the power of a crystal to control the land. Your goal is to go into the tower, smash the Soulbinders, break the crystal, and restore order to the land. There are a couple of minor twists, but generally, what you see is what you get.

Despite the title, it isn't a Vampire Survivors clone but something more akin to Tiny Rogues or another run-based action game. Each run begins in roughly the same way. You start in a village where you can select from a few weapons: ax, bow, scythe and sword. There's also a small selection of spells. Choose your weapon, pick your spell, approach the portal, and you're off on a run that's comprised of multiple stages in a row. Die, and you're back to the start with saved progress, so you can run again.

In battle, you can attack, dodge, or cast magic spells. Attacking is determined by your weapon. The sword is the generic all-around weapon. The ax is slow but does a powerful combo attack. The bow can be charged to hit from a distance. The scythe can be charged to hit in a large AoE around your character. Magic is chosen by the selected spell, but it offers melee options and a ranged option. However, to use magic, you have to charge up your mana bar by hitting enemies with melee attacks, so you can't really fight from a distance unless you're abusing the bow.

On each stage, your goal is to kill enough enemies to trigger the stairs and move to the next one. This is represented by a health bar that fills up as you kill enemies. (On boss floors, the health bar fills up as you damage the boss.) Once it is full, all remaining enemies on the floor die, and you can move to the next floor and earn a prize. These prizes include metaprogression rewards and skill cards, which unlock new abilities for your character, such as dealing lightning damage in an AoE or being able to land a critical hit.

The combat is fast-paced and fun. There's a good variety of enemies, and each have their own gimmicks, like deadly laser beams, boulders that have to be dodged, or homing explosions that punish you for standing still. Properly prioritizing the most dangerous enemies is essential, especially in the boss fights. The combat is smooth and easy to pick up, and it never feels unfair. Any time I died, it was my own mistake due to overconfidence or laziness.

The biggest thing holding back Hollow Survivors is that there isn't any interesting build variety. There's a small handful of skills, and most of them have no real impact on how you play; they provide passive buffs that are nice to have but don't feel like a "build" so much as a collection of random bonuses. Particularly noteworthy is that there a lot of options that only activate when you take damage. Considering that the game does everything it can to discourage taking damage, the options feel like a waste because if you're taking enough damage to activate them often, something is wrong. The damage that the options do is functionally identical to a single attack.

This leads to almost every run feeling identical, aside from your selected weapon. Other than flat damage buffs or abilities that trigger on dash, nothing else felt particularly noteworthy. There are one or two more distinct abilities, such as causing your magic spell to fire three smaller shots instead of one big shot, but they're the exception. I like the core gameplay and think it has a good loop, but the lack of build variety or options means that once you've gone through it a couple of times, you feel like you've run out of everything.

This is also true of the game's metaprogression. After every run, you can spend some of the resources you've gathered to power up your character or unlock things at the starting village. The core problem is that there isn't a lot to unlock. For example, you'll find one resource that lets you build buildings, but there are perhaps two buildings to actually build. You can find a different resource to get cosmetics, but there are only a couple of those, too. Even the power-ups for your character feel limited, with only the "revive upon death" skill feeling meaningful. The only unlockables that stood out were the weapons.

The result is that while Hollow Survivors is genuinely fun to play, it lacks the kind of long-term value I usually associate with these genres. The weapons and skills don't offer enough variety to keep me coming back, and once I'd seen the bosses a handful of times, there wasn't anything interesting to keep me going. You can unlock higher difficulty modes, but those mostly bloat the enemy HP, which doesn't do much to improve the overall feel of the game. It's difficult to not compare it to something like Tiny Rogues, which offers a similar gameplay feel but tons more content.

Hollow Survivors looks great. It has a charming, hand-drawn art style with a lot of details. The various enemies and weapons are clean and distinctive, there are some nice flourishes, like the way your weapon appearance changes based on the cards you have, and the bosses are huge and well animated. I wish the customization options for the protagonist were more varied. The soundtrack is standard, with a couple of good tracks but nothing that stands out. It's the perfect game to podcast and veg out with.

Hollow Survivors is a good game that's held back by a lack of content. The core gameplay loop is a ton of fun and provides engaging gameplay, but there's not enough meat on the bones to keep it fun and compelling for more than a couple of hours. If you're looking for something swift and breezy, Hollow Survivors does the job, but it's lacking when compared to other similar roguelikes on the market.

Score: 7.5/10