Hello and Welcome back to my blog!
“HoloCure - Save the Fans“ is a roguelite bullet hell type of game which on the surface looks like a cheap copy of Vampire Survivor but it surprises you with good gameplay and many interesting elements, and all that is completely free with no ads or in-app purchases at all. This is what the game says on the Steam page:
Play as your favourite Vtubers from Hololive! Fight, explore, and clear your way through armies of fans and save them from their mind control in this unofficial free fan game.
I had no idea what is Hololive but I was wondering why the game got Overwhelmingly positive reviews. So, I downloaded it and was not what I expected. Sure, it is heavily inspired by the likes of Vampire Survivor but it plays as we as some of the best games in this genre.
You choose a character for a run, each character has 3 unique skills and one ultimate skill, a unique weapon and a unique character design. There are two modes, a stage mode and an endless mode. The stage mode ends by defeating the boss of the area which spawns at around the 20-minute mark whereas the endless mode is just an endless run until the mob (aka fans) overwhelms you and kills you.
Throughout the run, you will gain experience points which will level you up. With each level up you will get to choose one option (skill upgrade, new weapon or weapon level upgrades, stats upgrades like damage, speed etc) from a list which will strengthen your build in one way or another.
This is where the fun begins, there are a lot of builds possible in this game. You have the storage of 12 items (weapons or buffs) which will make or break your run. All of those items can be ranked up and even enhanced using a special anvil drop that rarely drops in your runs.
You want to freeze your enemy, sure. Want to blow them away, why not? Want to burn them? drown? fry them with lasers? There are a lot of stuff you can use to kill those hordes and hordes of enemies. I meant the fans...lol
The game doesn't take itself too seriously and you will find a lot of hilarious enemy designs. One time I was attacked by some walking clocks and bread-faced sheeps (?) while a huge cat was following me on the map. I don't know how many stages it has, I can see 3 stages so far, not sure if I will see more after clearing the third one. It wasn't showing me the third until I cleared the first one.
There are a lot of power-ups and pickups during the run. You can get items which attach to your main weapon and make it even stronger. You can even combine (collab) two weapons to make a super powerful weapon. There will be plenty of bosses to kill which drops even more packages containing item/weapon upgrades. There are some super rare items as well.
The in-game currency is called Holocoin which is used to unlock new characters, upgrade basic stats like max health, speed, attack, etc. and to unlock some more mechanics.
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Another interesting aspect of the game is the Holo House section where you can play some mini-games including fishing and planting. You can even buy furniture and place it in your house.
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You can earn HoloCoins from these side activities and use those coins to upgrade your stats. Fishing is a much quicker way to earn those coins than the runs, especially at the start of the game.
Although this is a good side activity thing but I will prefer the main runs as that gameplay is really addictive. All of this for free, this fan project is really well made.
I looked at the achievements page, there are 168 in total. I will try to get all of them for sure.
If you know the Hololive scene and the VTubing community you will surely get a lot of references. I didn't get a lot of stuff in the writing. I bet some of the bosses are depicting real VTubers.
The best part about this like other similar games in the genre is testing different builds and making that God afk build. The collab feature is really good too. It doesn't tell you which weapons will combine with which to form what but once you have two compatible ones you can do it. And after that, you sort of unlock that info and you can see it later. But you have to do it once before it shows up.
I didn't expect it to be this fun and addictive. It runs fine with hundreds of projectiles on my old PC. The animations could have been smoother but I can't nitpick these things from a completely free game that is not even showing ads or any other purchases. You can see the love poured by the developers in making this one. I don't know why I found it after a year but it was worth the wait, I guess.
Thanks for reading!
Note:
- All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
- Screenshots are from the game, HoloCure - Save the Fans.