Mashing Warhammer with the chaos that is Vampire Survivors is a match made in a grimdark universe. It’s perfect. And at a glance, Warhammer Survivors hits the mark with its visual style and nods to the source material. Once you get underneath that surface success, though, it’s a slightly inferior clone.

At its core, Warhammer Survivors adheres pretty closely to Vampire Survivors. That makes sense since developers Auroch worked closely with the Vampire Survivors team, so if you were expecting some radical leaps forward or huge improvements, you’d best rein those expectations in. The name nails it: it’s Vampire Survivors, but Warhammer-ified.

That means you still control the whole game with a single stick. Your job is to choose a direction and start walking until the tide of bodies becomes so thick and vast that moving isn’t an option anymore. You slowly acquire new auto-firing weapons, abilities and upgrades by sucking up XP skulls like a glorified Henry Hoover, eventually unleashing so many explosions that you’re basically a glorified firework testing facility on legs. You try to last as long as you can while snagging cash to spend on permanent upgrades and completing a lengthy list of objectives to unlock new levels, characters, and items. Repeat until you die of old age, or in battle as the Emperor himself would command. It’s probably going to be the second one.

The enjoyment comes from that gradual building of power, the decimation of hordes of enemies and the thrill of holding out for as long as possible. At these things, Vampire Survivors excelled. It delivered dopamine hits like a machine gun.

Despite the fact that Warhammer Survivors seems almost identical to its long-fanged cousin, though, there’s something a little…off. The biggest thing is that the health and damage are radically skewed in this game. Many of the enemies and bosses take vastly more punishment than their Vampire Survivors counterparts. As an example, the 15-minute boss in Vampire Survivors has 200HP per level of your character, whereas the 15-minute Carnifex in Warhammer Survivors has 2500HP per level. Predictably, the result is one hell of a sponge. I constantly ran into mini-boss enemies in the opening minutes that could withstand an absurd level of damage.

A lot of the weapons feel uninteresting or weak to use, and weapon evolutions are usually just stat-based rather than the cool evolutions we saw in Vampire Survivors. Weapons being underpowered means several of the characters here feel utterly useless when starting levels until you can dodge around enough to pick up something more useful. That makes the initial stages of a run feel like a slog. But the important part is that the weapons just aren’t as fun.

Speaking of slogging, that’s the general vibe I get from everything. The game also just feels slow in a way that Vampire Survivors doesn’t. That game had you getting something cool or unlocking something cool in almost every run, whereas here everything seems to take much more grinding.

I can’t knock the amount of content you get, mind you. Warhammer Survivors is split into Warhammer 40K and Age of Sigmar, both of which are pretty much entire games in their own right, boasting their own rosters of unlockable characters, weapons, powerups and stages. Some upgrades also carry across both universes, which is an intriguing idea that gently prods you toward remembering that there’s two branches of game to explore.

The downside is that it increases that slow grind I mentioned earlier. While some upgrades carry across both universes, a lot of them don’t, so whenever you swap over it can fee like you’re going backwards. Unless you try to balance out progress on both, but that just means you’re slowing down the sense of progression even more. I’m not convinced this split-game style was the way to go, but also understand that Games Workshop wouldn’t want their two universes being smashed together.

To put it bluntly, I got bored of Warhammer Survivors much faster than I did with Vampire Survivors. Part of that may be because the genre is no longer as new or exciting, of course, but I don’t think that’s the main reason.

The good new is a lot of my problems with the game will likely get fixed since it’s a case of nerfing a few numbes here and buffing a few over there. That won’t fix the weapons themselves being a little boring, but it will help everything else. And there’s already a substantial roadmap for future content, too.