Submarine Survivor

Genre: Arcade / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Good morning, everyone. and welcome to How To Design a Mediocre Vampire Survivors-style “Bullet Heaven” Game 101. I’ll be your teacher today, Mr. McNeill. Before we begin, I just want to make sure people are in the right class. People often confuse this for How To Design a Terrible Vampire Survivors-style “Bullet Heaven” Game 101. For that class you want to walk down the hall to room 271. It’s the one where they’re looking at the game Catlord.

We all good? Okay, I’ll begin. Everyone turn your textbooks to page 57, the entry for Submarine Survivor. This game came out on PC in 2024 and then in 2025 was ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Yes, please save your questions until the end of class. Notice the use of the word “Survivor” in the title – that’s such a common feature among games of this type that I would almost call it a requisite.

Now, if you’re aiming to be a mediocre Bullet Heaven game and not a bad one, you need to remember to start off with a good premise, something to answer the question, “why would anyone even play this in the first place when they could just play Vampire Survivors instead?”, and here the answer is that you’re piloting a submarine underwater fighting off sea creatures. Okay, decent premise that gives us something different than the Castlevania-esque theme of Vampire Survivors, good.

However, when we turn our attention to the rest of the presentation, what do we see? Yes, the word you’re looking for, ladies and gentlemen, is “bland”. Again, not bad, we’re not aiming for bad here. The cartoony 2D visuals look clean and distinct enough that you can tell what they are, but they’re not distinctive. They have no personality to them beyond the bare minimum needed for the themes and premise. Oh, and for the background music, be sure to use something that you will instantly forget the moment you stop playing.

Now, gameplay. I see a lot of people thinking that for a mediocre game, you need to have absolutely no gameplay innovations, and that’s not true. Quite a lot of games are mediocre despite having some truly ingenious innovations. Case in point, Submarine Survivor shakes up the usual “survive as long as possible” formula by instead having a level-based system that challenges players to survive for 5 minutes, with each level featuring one of a handful of different hazards or obstacles. This does truly help to make this a different sort of experience from the norm in this genre.

A mediocre game often has genuinely good qualities too. For example, Submarine Survivors features a wealth of permanent upgrades you can purchase using in-game currency, giving this Arcade-style gameplay its “Roguelite” element that is really necessary for the genre.

Okay, so we’ve addressed multiple reasons this is a mediocre game and not a bad one. Does anyone want to tell me what keeps this from being a genuinely good game? Anyone? Anyone? Okay, let’s look at the moment-to-moment gameplay. Bullet Heaven games can be very repetitive, so if we want to make a mediocre game, we need to take advantage of that by making that repetitive gameplay slow. Let’s have your little submarine only shooting out automatic attacks every once in a while instead of constantly. And make sure that even when upgraded, it never reaches the level of satisfying constant screen-filling attacks that you get in good Bullet Heaven games.

Ah, yes, I see the confusion on your faces. “What keeps you from dying if attacks are so scarce?”. Anyone care to venture a guess? No? The answer is, have fewer enemies. Yes, Vampire Survivor’s swarms of hundreds of enemies on-screen at a time are generally not the sort of thing you’ll find in a mediocre Bullet Heaven game, and we see that here as well.

However, all of this is beside the main point. What is the golden rule when you want a Bullet Heaven game to be mediocre instead of good? The one most important thing? Come on, you should know this, people – you all took the prerequisite Mediocre Roguelike 101 course. The answer is, make all of the Roguelike upgrades boring stat-based upgrades. That’s right, for a truly mediocre Bullet Heaven, apart from weapons, the only upgrades you find as you build up your character in-game should only change things like attack strength, speed, health, and so on. And furthermore, those differences should be so minute that you won’t notice them as you upgrade.

How about another requirement of mediocre Bullet Heaven games? Anyone want to venture a guess? No? Make enemies extremely repetitive, and only very rarely introduce new ones. Come on people, this is low-hanging fruit, you really should be able to answer this.

Of course, there can be other negatives as well. For example, in Submarine Survivor, the text is small enough that it’s very difficult to read in handheld mode. Oh, and another important thing to remember with a mediocre Bullet Heaven game is that you really, really want the price tag to be $5 – it needs to be enough to make players ask “why did I pay the same price as Vampire Survivors for this?” and not “how did they think they could get away with charging more than Vampire Survivors for this?”

Okay, so bring this all together, and what do you get? Hmm? You get a game like Submarine Survivor, an Arcade-style Roguelike “Bullet Heaven” game that’s perfectly adequate, enjoyable even, but the entire time you’re playing it you’ll be asking yourself why you’re not playing a better Bullet Heaven game. Okay, I think that does it for today’s class, but for homework I want everyone to read up on the textbook chapter on boring weapon design – it will be in the test that’s coming up!

tl;dr – Submarine Survivor is an Arcade-style Roguelike in the “Bullet Heaven” style similar to Vampire Survivors, with players piloting a submarine that automatically attacks to fend off hostile sea creatures. While not terrible, this is extremely repetitive, with slow gameplay, boring upgrades, and little to justify the same $5 price tag as Vampire Survivors. You have multiple better options in this genre.

Grade: C

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