It’s been a minute since I had a chance to sit down with a Vampire Survivors like title. Though VS broke the seal on the genre and continues to do it best, I love all the different interpretations of the approach. Things like 20 Minutes Before Dawn or Brotato have certainly added their own flair to the formula, and that’s basically what we hope for with every conception of an imitation. It seems that solo developer Rowan Edmondson wants to do something different, fun, and, ultimately, immensely intensive while still being accessible, and gaming grandfather Acclaim is throwing their name behind him to make it a possibility. The result, Ground Zero Hero, is a wacky, irreverent survivor-like with a very engaging loop that gets players hooked immediately. However, the ceiling approaches very quickly, and keeping a player’s interest up is a challenging, fleeting thing.

These headbanging chicken scientists tell you all you need to know. Not really.

Set against the backdrop of a post-nuclear wasteland, your character is a survivor of some devastating disaster that has left everything irradiated and mutated. Across five biomes, you’re attacked by increasing waves of strange, aggressive and sometimes adorable creatures, ranging from garden gnomes and penguins to giant skateboarding aliens and immense yeti-like beings. If you can manage to survive the onslaught of ten thousand mobs, you’ll square off a boss creature who feels almost comically easy after dealing with the nonstop pressure cooker of the regular mobs. Enemies drop blobs of nuclear waste that gradually fill up your gauge, and, upon maxing out, you get to choose one of three upgrades that come in the form of weapons (shoot spikes out your back, zap foes with an electric eel tail) or passive improvements (dodge increase, faster movement). Multiple weapon pickups equal higher levels and better attacks.

That healthy green glow means I’ve been applying sunscreen regularly!

This is all pretty old hat for anyone who has picked up Vampire Survivors, so let’s focus on the differences. The biggest one is your candy meter, which is exactly what it sounds like. In a world gone raw and mad, being able to find something sweet is imperative to your survival. While keeping up your health is important, finding candy inside pinatas or dropped by a top hat wearing crocodile who dances across the screen is crucial. Candy is fairly plentiful, so it’s not a difficult metric to keep up, but it is something to be aware of. Having to basically leave a safe orbit to go and break open a paper mache dinosaur is an ongoing task, but the pinatas will also occasionally drop money, health refills, nuclear waste magnets and metal detectors (to find safes full of money), so you’d do well to keep breaking them open.

Various procedurally generated aspects of the world are exciting and give plenty of variety to each run. You might find a safe, which asks you to stay in proximity until you crack it open, netting you a cache of coins in exchange for risking your life as the horde closes in. There’s several kinds of hazards that’ll damage your enemy, like unexploded missiles, or ones that’ll hurt you, like clouds of toxic gas. If you happen upon some mushrooms, you can consume them to slow everything down and get some trippy views of the monsters in an altered state. And finding a mount is such a thrill, as you get a temporary companion with strong attacks, invulnerability and an explosion at the end. We might be relying a bit too much on the explosions within the game, but how else do you conclude a romp on a two headed cow?

Goodbye, Bessie. You weren’t a good cow, or a smart cow, or a reliable cow…but you were flammable.

The day and night cycle of Ground Zero Hero is a risk/reward where the risk is always worth it after a certain point. At night, powerful mobs of monsters (vampires, mummies, etc) will come out, being far sturdier and more lethal than daytime mobs. If you don’t have the firepower on hand, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, so the game will hide strategic bunkers where you can rest, avoid the night time and even recover some HP in the process. It’s also the only opportunity you have to save, a rare and interesting aspect in a survivor-like title. Being able to pause the run in order to go off and do other things and pick it back up later seems like the antithesis of the genre, but it’s helpful for longer runs.

“Cyclops, NO!” – Jean Grey in the new X-Men movie, probably.

If, however, you choose to stay out of the bunker, though, the more powerful enemies drop supercharged nuclear waste, something usually only present in elite mobs, and clearing a large group of night time monsters is a recipe for at least a couple of mutation level ups in a single set. Not to mention there are missions for each stage that ask you to do some task (kill so many monsters, activate so many traps) and one of the perineal missions is to survive a full run without going into a bunker. Tons of EXP, extra cash and expediting the run all seem like great reasons to roll the dice, but there is the issue of the monsters being, seriously, much stronger, faster and deadlier. This is where the key mechanic of Ground Zero Hero comes into play, and where the game shines and dampens in the same breath: going bonkers.

Every weapon has a chance to “go bonkers” with each firing, whether you’re slashing at enemies with your tentacle or blasting fireballs out of your mouth. When you successfully trigger a bonkers attack, you’ll do an impossibly overpowered version of your weapon. The tentacle, for example, will swing a massive rainbow arc, clearing out tons of enemies behind, above or in front of you. Both the cyclops laser and the electric eel tail are invaluable, as they produce a huge chain reaction of ranged attacks with punishing damage that can effectively clear the screen. The biggest oddity is the egg-laying attack, which is already a hard one to utilize (drop egg grenades as you walk along). Its bonkers mode is to lay a giant rainbow egg which, when hatched, will produce a man in a chicken costume, who gleefully runs across the map, punting enemies into oblivion. It’s…interesting.

In fact, the bizarre humor of Ground Zero Hero may be what gets people on board and keeps them there for the duration. The art styling is wildly cartoonish, and it seems to pull influences from every piece of animation in the last twenty years. You’ve got some very apparent influence from Cyanide and Happiness, Rick and Morty and, most noticeably, The Simpsons. There’s more than a couple of alien beings who remind me a lot of Kang and Kodos, and a winter fairy who gets summoned to freeze enemies reminds me of Ralph Wiggum with blonde locks. The visuals are excellent, don’t get me wrong, and the diversity of the biomes along with the enemy types, different mounts that you can ride (which quickly expire without some powerups) and explosions you encounter make it quite the visual feast.

Now that I’ve officially discovered aliens, it’s time to wipe them all out.

The shortcoming, at least from my experience, is how quickly you max out on the potential excitement of it all. In the beginning, you’re leveling up outside of the game, revealing new and interesting aspects that you can potentially get in the game. So, if you initially only can do the tentacle attack, it’s quite thrilling to see that you’ve unlocked medusa hair (to turn enemies to stone), beast master (to make mounts stay longer) or fly eyes (passive enemy attack dodging). You keep finding more and more things, hoping for the next great twist in the game, and then…it’s done. I was still only on the second biome (which might indicate my own poor skill) when I maxed out my leveling. Suddenly, there were no more weapon based surprises coming up. What I had was all I was going to get.

Don’t get me wrong, Ground Zero Hero doesn’t leave you totally out to dry. The money that you pick up can continue to improve passive elements about your build (faster walking speed, bigger explosions, greater chance to go bonkers), but these are all things under the hood. I kept hoping that I might discover something in the wasteland that would unlock another cool weapon, or discover a synergy that would permanently let me know about a new weapon combination, or literally one other character to use, even if it was just a skin/palette swap. As ungrateful as it may sound, the core game is competent and fairly well played, but I was just hoping for more. The game wants me to keep playing to go further, but I hit the wall in terms of how versatile I can be very early. After that, my improvements are subtle and sensible.

It’s 2026 and we’re mixing Rodney Dangerfield humor into gaming. Progress!

Ground Zero Hero is fast, frantic and funny. It’s got real notes of unhinged humor, works great on Switch 2 (some minor stuttering when things get super busy) and is a great pick-up-and-play title. It doesn’t expand as much as I’d like, but the different worlds, missions and upgrades will give you hours of explosive, bonkers entertainment. There’s plenty of room for expansion and improvement, so fingers crossed that Edmonson will consider DLC or a sequel in the future. But in the meantime, just gulp down your nuclear waste, hold onto your chicken butt and head out into the wasteland: you might just be the hero we’ve all been waiting for.

Ground Zero Hero is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A copy of Ground Zero Hero was provided by the publisher.