Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Bloodmoon

Vampire Survivors has truly stood the test of time. Not only has it kicked off the whole swarm survivor/bullet heaven genre, it continues to release new content every chance it gets. Heck, it even received a spinoff game in the form of Vampire Crawlers! The latest expansion offering from poncle is called Legacy of the Bloodmoon, and with it, comes a ton of new content!

Title: Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Bloodmoon
Platform: Steam (Reviewed), Epic Games Storm, Xbox (One/Series X|S, PS4/5, Switch, iOS, Android, Apple Arcade
Reviewed On: PC
Developer: poncle
Publisher: poncle
Release Date: August 28, 2026
Price: $0.99

What is Vampire Survivors?

Perhaps you haven’t tried the game yet, and you just heard about the newest expansion, Legacy of the Bloodmoon, and want to try it out. While I won’t go fully in-depth as I have already done so in my review of the base game when it was released a few years ago, I will give you a brief overview.

Before the genre was coined as bullet heaven, many fans referred to this genre of games as a swarm survivor because that is exactly what Vampire Survivors is. You pick a character, which has a unique starting weapon; you pick a stage, and then you kill wave after wave of increasingly difficult monsters in an attempt to survive for 30 minutes (or whatever timer the stage has as different stages have shorter timers than others).

When you kill enemies, you collect experience gems until you level up. There, you will be given a choice of three random items. They could be weapons, or they could be passive items. You can have a total of 6 weapons and 6 passive items (however, there are some ways to go beyond those limits!). Some passive items, when paired with a weapon, will cause that weapon to evolve into something far more powerful.

And that’s it. You create a build, smite enemies, and survive until Death comes and kills you once the allotted time has passed. All weapons auto-fire, so all you have to do is move around and not touch any enemies.

Simple. Addictive. Fun.

Legacy of the Bloodmoon Features

When it comes to expansions, what we get here is pretty standard fare when it comes to the content that poncle typically adds to the game whenever a new expansion launches; however, the amount of content will keep you busy for hours and hours on end.

What you get is:

• 12 brand-new characters
• 16 new weapons
• 11 new music tracks
• 1 new adventure
• 1 very large stage: Red Moon Manor

Quite a few of the new characters appear as bosses within Red Moon Manor. In fact, there is an achievement to kill four of them in a single run before the 30-minute timer expires. The path to typically unlock most of the characters is to play one of the new ones and survive for 15 minutes, along with getting their weapon to an evolved state. Doing so will unlock that weapon for all characters and unlock the next character.

Unlocking the rest comes from meeting certain conditions, all of which can be read on the Unlock menu from the game’s title screen. There is a Secrets menu to input codes, but as of the time of this writing, no codes have been made known online; this can sometimes serve as an alternative way to unlock characters, passive items, items which grant new features, arcanas, and more.

The weapons are kind of hit or miss this time around. Scarlet Needle does seem pretty powerful, and its evolved version, Cardinal Rain, does screen-wide damage by raining those needles across the entire field of view. Screams of the Void sounds really cool from a naming convention; however, it reminds me of Garlic… just in pulses and not constant… until it evolves into Forbidden Siren, which does place a damage zone around your character.

The standout weapon that I experienced so far is the trio of FireBall, FireWall, and FireFall. This is a repeat of a previous trio of weapons: SpellString, SpellStrike, and SpellStorm. Each weapon must be picked up separately and leveled up to level six. Once all three are at max level, opening a treasure chest will cause them to evolve into FireStall, which reminds me a lot of Sigma’s Sole Solution… without the side effect of lag and your character disappearing. It’s one of the more visually impressive spells once evolved, and what’s cool about it is if you rotate your thumbstick really quickly, you can spin the flames on either side of you to cover more area.

It’s also the starting weapon of Sargon, which is also one of the coolest-looking characters in Vampire Survivors to date! Sargon itself is thematic because to unlock him, you need in evolve the Incineration weapon.

As for the stage, it’s quite impressive. You have an outside area as well as the interior of the Manor itself, which contains a few sections and plenty of secrets, including its main boss, Baal’Thasar, which becomes playable once you defeat him. There’s also a statue you can break using a certain weapon (I’ll let you figure that out for yourself), which will grant you yet another playable character.

As time has gone on, poncle has done an incredible job with the “mega map” stages. It’s not like EverQuest with flat textures and a house every 100,000 feet. There are goals, objectives, secrets, bosses, and plenty to discover. Red Moon Manor is no different, as it will take you several trips to get everything accomplished.

The new adventure is about what you would expect as well. Another story-driven chapter that takes you through the expansion across seven chapters as if it were a fresh run. They give you 10000 coins to start, and there are 18 unlocks to get by completing it. Of course, you will get some coins to spend in the standard version of the game once you complete it.

The majority of the new music tracks belong to the new characters. This was a great touch when poncle first introduced this feature. While there is nothing wrong with the stage music, having unique music play based on what character you choose just adds to the overall theme and flavor for that character. Not every character has their own theme, and if you prefer the stage music, you can always toggle it off.

Overall Thoughts

I mean, what can I say? It’s Vampire Survivors with new content. That just means new characters to unlock, new items and secrets to find, and a new adventure to spend countless more hours in. While this expansion doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it doesn’t have to.

Vampire Survivors has found a formula that works. If you don’t believe me, go on Steam and look at the myriads of clones that came out just because of this game. Legacy of the Bloodmoon gives us more of the same that we’ve come to know and love about this game, and of course, it doesn’t matter which of the new weapons you use, in the end, they will decimate anything and everything in their path… unless you’re playing on Inverse Mode like I was, and wondered if poncle upped the difficulty on us without realizing that you left that game mode checked. Oops.

If you love Vampire Survivors, then Legacy of the Bloodmoon is going to be a must-have and must-experience expansion for you. If you’re a new player, though, I would highly recommend just starting at the beginning. Don’t worry, you’ll only have seven previous expansions and countless content updates to play through before you get here. Sounds daunting, but don’t worry… the level of addiction and fun this game brings will keep you coming back and wanting to conquer it all!

On the bright side, at least you didn’t have to write this review twice because you accidentally were playing through the Legacy of the Moonspell content…

*ahem*

A little more distinction in your expansion names, maybe?

Review Disclosure Statement: Resonance: Vampire Survivors: Legacy of the Bloodmoon was provided to us by poncle for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.