Attention, League of Legends players and survival game enthusiasts! For the first time ever, you’ll be able to come together in harmony, thanks to the MOBA game’s latest summer event. For a limited time, you’ll be able to try out the Anima Squad PvE group mode, a loving parody of Vampire Survivor and other survival games.
Here’s how it works. There are four stages in total, and you’ll get two characters from Anima Squad (a specific line of skins for League of Legends champions that’s getting a major expansion in conjunction with this event) as your starting roster. Your task is to jump in and survive as long as possible to unlock permanent upgrades, achievements, and new characters. You can tackle it solo, but I tried the mode earlier this month, and I have to say, it’s a pretty fun co-op side attraction away from the Rift.
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For those who haven’t played Vampire Survivor or similar games, they typically see you enter a top-down arena and are asked to survive waves of incoming enemies, each with their own attacks and quirks. Your basic attack fires automatically, but in the swarm mode of the alliance, your hero also has two active skills: a special attack and an ultimate skill. As you kill enemies and collect XP, you level up, providing new upgrades and auto-attacks to help deal with the increasing difficulty of the incoming enemies. Each stage has a final boss, and after each completed playthrough, you can collect coins as you play and spend them on permanent upgrades to your character range, pushing you to continue progressing.
The obvious plus here is that this mode is definitely not lazy–something thrown together just to sell skins. A lot of love and effort has clearly been put into it, and each character’s group kit reflects their regular moveset, but tweaked to make sense in this new format. I couldn’t be happier with the diverse characters: Blair, in particular. Her kit revolves around self-healing and losing control, making her a challenging–but extremely fun–champ to play against groups. Ranged characters like Jinx also have a sense of their DPS carrying, while tanks like Leona actually manage to feel like melee powerhouses, despite obviously not needing to hug every enemy you see.
Technically, it’s impressive, too. Everything runs in the client, and given League’s history, the mode can handle a lot of units and VFX on screen at once without any issues, which is impressive. Speaking to reporters on the scene, the mode’s developers said they had to tweak the way the game identifies creeps in order for it to work properly, which drastically cuts down on the resources spent spawning and maintaining tiny enemies on screen. Pretty cool stuff!
As for the visuals, it’s very bright and very lovely. This obviously fits in well with the new skins, and selling these skins is obviously Riot Games’ main goal, while also making sure players have fun and experience something new. This isn’t a skin line I would choose, but it will probably be a big hit with the community. Even for my own personal tastes, I have to give a shout out to the Abyss Champion skin and the hordes of enemies, which seem to reflect this dark Abyss aquatic visual theme with a futuristic touch in a way that is undeniably pleasing.
If you’re a fan of Vampire Survivors League, this one’s worth checking out. As for when you can play it, the game mode will be available on the PBE on June 25th and on public servers on July 17th.
