Xbox Game Pass mega hit Vampire Survivors will get a serious performance boost next month

the long awaited vampire survivors The engine update is upon us! Developer Poncle has finally announced that the game will fully switch to the new engine on August 17, just over a month from the time of writing.

The game currently runs on Phaser, but the team has been working on porting it to Unity. On the development side, the main benefit of migrating to Unity is to simplify cross-platform development. However, for gamers, Unity offers much better performance.

Poncle shared the news in a steam postwhich also gave us a new look at co-op, which was announced last month.

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You might be surprised to learn that Vampire Survivors, a game that takes place on a 2D plane with primitive visuals and barely animated character sprites, can somehow perform terribly. The truth is, no amount of PC power can smooth out those late-game dips.

Once you’ve developed all of your weapons and you’re very close to the 30 minute mark, especially if Limit Break is on, puff hard. That was a limitation of the old engine, something Poncle says shouldn’t happen with Unity.

The Xbox version of Vampire Survivors and recently released mobile ports have already been running on Unity. Since Poncle revealed the intention to switch to Unity in September of last year, two versions of the game have remained on PC. Some players outside of the development team were even able to play the beta.

The general consensus is very positive, particularly when it comes to the responsiveness of the game’s UI during the later stages. The performance updates also benefit Steam Deck users and anyone with a lower-spec PC, so that’s good news for everyone.

If you’ve somehow avoided playing Vampire Survivors (the BAFTA Game of the Year winner for 2022), you should definitely fix that. Even now, before the engine change, this is an excellent game, and one of the best on Game Pass.