In 2020, Among Us (2018) was the big breakout indie hit. A simple game made by a small team that just clicked in the minds of players worldwide and became a sensation. In 2022, Vampire Survivors was the big breakout indie hit. A simple game made by a small team that just clicked in the minds of players worldwide and became a sensation. And in 2023, those two have teamed up for a crossover DLC. More specifically, Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is a DLC for Vampire Survivors that adds Among Us content to the game. And while it sounds like a complete meme, with Emergency Meeting, the team behind Vampire Survivors (2022) poncle might have just created some of the very best content available in the game.
In all honesty, I was never the biggest fan of Vampire Survivors. I thought it was solid for what it was, but nothing extraordinary—certainly not a Game of the Year contender. And with Among Us, while I did play a fair amount when it originally released, I similarly didn’t think anything about it was particularly outstanding beyond some simple fun with friends. “So why did you play Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting then?” I hear you asking. I’m not sure. I know part of it was the animated announcement trailer that went way harder than it had any right to. Another part of it is probably that I felt like I had missed something with Vampire Survivors, and this was an excuse to give it another shot. And the extremely fair monetization of anything Vampire Survivors doesn’t hurt the case either.
Regardless of my reasoning for jumping back into Vampire Survivors and playing Emergency Meeting, I’m very glad I did. Because it finally clicked. And the credit for that has to go to the DLC content. Emergency Meeting comes with a new map, some new characters, and new weapons, and a lot of those are simply more fun, more interesting, and more clever than anything I ever encountered in the base game. I guess that just goes to show what a talented team that already managed to do a lot with very few resources can do when they’re given a few more resources to work with.
Let’s start with the new map, which is almost an exact one-to-one copy of the Among Us map Polus. What makes this map special (beyond just looking cool) is that every five minutes, a siren starts going off, giving you a limited amount of time to get to a given location. If you succeed, you get a chest with a bunch of rewards; if you fail, you’re in serious trouble. If you couldn’t tell already, this is an adoption of the emergency tasks from Among Us that are a major part of its gameplay loop. What this does here is give you something to do at regular intervals while also giving you rewards that make this map feel more approachable for beginners than others. On top of that, there are some passive items and even a weapon lying around on the map, which are free for you to take.
All the new characters are just differently colored crewmates. A red one, a green one, a yellow one, etc. But don’t mistake them for simple skins of each other; they each come with their own signature weapon and ability. I could not believe how much this team was able to squeeze out of Among Us and its little crewmates. I don’t want to give too much away, because I think a lot of the fun I had with this was figuring out what the newly unlocked crewmate does and what each weapon looked like once it was evolved. But it’s safe to say that every possible element in Among Us has somehow been turned into weaponry. Tasks from the Polus map, venting, emergency meetings, impostors—you name it, and it’s probably been implemented into the new characters and weapons of Emergency Meeting.
What I thought would be nothing more than a silly meme to get a quick buck turned out to be an incredible DLC filled with some exceptional content. I can’t guarantee that Emergency Meeting will get you into Vampire Survivors if you weren’t interested before, but if you had been looking for an excuse to jump back in, you won’t get a much better one than this. And who knows, maybe you’re like me, and Emergency Meeting finally makes Vampire Survivors click for you. I went from barely caring about the game to being ecstatic for whatever the team at poncle has in store next. Whether that’s more Vampire Survivors DLC or a new project, I can’t wait.
Nairon played Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting on PC with his own copy.
