When Vampire Rush debuted as a Nokia-exclusive Xbox Windows Phone game at the beginning of April, it won my heart with its mixture of action and tower defense gameplay, humor, and a distinct lack of sparkles. But it did suffer from a couple of broken Achievements as well as a conspicuous lack of the iOS version’s Survival mode. The developers promised a patch, and so I didn’t stress over those issues too harshly in our review.
Not two months later, that patch has arrived. Unfortunately though, applying the update seems to break the game. It crashes on start-up and becomes unplayable. There is a workaround, however: delete the game and reinstall it. You’ll get the updated version, properly working and with some choice improvements.
However, reinstalling also means you’ll lose your save data, setting you back a bit on the grinding Achievements. Should you update then? If you’re not that far in the game, sure. But if you’ve invested a few hours into Vampire Rush already, you might want to hold off. We notified Lithuanian developer A-Steroids of the updating problem. They’re now investigating the cause so that they can put out another update (that won’t crash the game).
Welcome to Survival Mode
The most significant addition of the version 1.1 update is Survival mode. To unlock it, you’ll need to complete the second Campaign level, Valley of Winds. This unlocks the first Survival mode stage. Beating the fifth stage gets you Cemetery Survival, and the final stage unlocks Outpost Survival.
Survival Mode puts you in much longer and harder versions of the original campaign stages. The enemies come in large numbers right off the bat, and you won’t have much time to prepare your defenses. You’ll only have access to whatever towers and upgrades you’ve already unlocked in the Campaign, so you might not want to jump into Survival right after beating the second level.
Frantically fending off hordes of monsters proves quite addictive – and challenging. Each Survival stage has its own friends leaderboard. Even if you can’t beat the stage, you might at least be able to outdo your friends!
Achievement partially unlocked
Good news, bad news time. The good news is the ‘Gorgeous Greg’ Achievement can now be unlocked. Just reach the fourth Campaign stage and kill the Red Lord enemy (pictured below) without dying. As long as you take a hit but remain alive while killing him, you’ll unlock the Achievement!
Sadly though, the second broken Achievement ‘Rich and Famous’ did not get fixed with this update. The Achievement is supposed to unlock when players accumulate a total of 100,000 gold throughout the course of the game; it is not Survival-specific. However, A-Steroids has not yet been able to determine why the Achievement doesn’t trigger properly, and so it remains broken.
But don't give up hope, Achievement hunters! As I mentioned earlier, Vampire Rush is due for a second update that will correct the installation problems of today’s update. Once that’s out of the way, the developer still plans to release a third update that will fix ‘Rich and Famous.'
Vampire killing time
Vampire Rush is exclusive to Nokia Lumia phones for the next five months or so.
Vampire Rush – Windows Phone 7 or 8 – 137 MB - $2.99 – Store Link
