Megabonk, the latest in the surviving rogue-like genre that burst onto the scene with Vampire Survivors, is not just any old take on the now slightly worn, relatively new style of game. No, Megabonk asks a little more of the player, including to please break the game.
It’s with this ethos that the game fundamentally gets why Vampire Survivors was so successful, far more than its contemporaries. Vampire Survivors was about trying to figure out a way to bust the game in some capacity. Overleveling and careful choices about what weapons you took would often result in the game slowly, but entirely deliberately begin to fall apart at the seams.
If you’ve never played a game like this, or only looked from afar, Megabonk functions almost identically to others in the genre, except that it is in 3D. You start out with one specialised weapon for your chosen character, and then it’s up to you to level them up in the time limit to beat the level’s boss and maybe unlock something new.
Enemies continuously spawn, but you only have to worry about movement, challenges, and working on how to unlock all of Megabonk’s characters. Attacking it entirely automatic, so the game offers quite a number of ways to increase your stats so you can start insta-killing enemies by the bucket load.
Megabonk 3D Perspective is Refreshing for the Genre
The jump to 3D really did flick a switch back on in my head. I’ve played dozens of hours of Vampire Survivors, Halls of Torment, and even a bit of Brotato before the samey or more “grounded” entries began to make me think I was simply done with the genre.
Instead, a new perspective was all I needed and a little more interaction with the game. I had to quickly readapt to old Quake tactics of bunnyhopping around the map to pick up speed, as the swarms honed in on me. It’s also especially funny that Megabonk never tries to keep the enemies in order, as I’ll swing the camera around to see what’s behind me and see a stack of goblins coming at me like a tsunami.
Seeing as movement is the game’s primary and really, only moment-to-moment influence that the player actively has from the get-go, it’s good to report that it’s totally serviceable. Characters move on a dime, and it’s all very much accommodated for twitch gameplay. Running forward and suddenly seeing a skeleton rise from the ground or a red warning bubble of where an attack will land are easily avoided as long as your reflexes can cope.
Megabonk Difficulty
As each enemy dies, it leaves a piece of XP and some change, which can be used to upgrade characters. At the end of each run, you reset, but take some silver coins that can be used to unlock different items. The grind isn’t especially deep, and as long as I remained on task, unlocks were fairly frequent.
Beating a boss will unlock the next tier to the level, where I found the difficulty starts to spike in ways that irritated, rather than encouraged.
Exploring tier 3 and activating the boss resulted in an enemy that just wasn’t feasible to beat with the current run. Between the time limit ushering in the “final swarm”, a never-ending legion of ghosts intended to force the run to an end, and it’s over 500k in health, it can become annoying after dedicating around half an hour to a run that’s ultimately futile in trying to find success.
Break it
When the game gets going, however, as unlocks and different abilities begin to mesh, Megabonk is truly special. There’s just something about a game that’s willing to allow the player to break it however they can.
One particular run saw me acquire an aura that expanded so far, no enemies could actually touch me before disintegrating. Another had me flinging bones, fireballs, and lightning so fast that the enemies would pop out of the ground, only to die immediately.
Each run, despite being the same goal each time, rarely feels “samey”. Unless I deliberately went out of my way to find a particular build, it was very uncommon for the game to have me repeat a previous round entirely.
Megabonk Meme Language
I was also disappointed in the lack of variety in the challenges that you can apply to different runs. There’s a lot of “make the game harder”, but not in interesting ways. The two “Hyper” modes I’d unlocked increased the number of enemies but reduced treasure costs or increased XP gain.
These were good fun, as it resulted in truly broken builds like a monkey with what became a banana boomerang shield because I’d upgraded “duration”. With more “duration”, items like bananarangs that are supposed to de-spawn after a set amount of time simply began to linger for longer.
The others, however, are just about increasing the enemy health or making the game overall tougher without any boons to the player. While the game wants the player to break it, it’s tough to do so when trying to get a footing on the mode is scuppered by ludicrous expectations. It’d have been nice to have more variety of things to do in these challenges, other than simply harder or quicker versions of the main game.
This said, the game is loaded with things to do and unlock. There are 20 characters to earn, as well as dozens of challenges to try to beat. I’m a particular fan of some of the character designs, like the wizard fox or skateboarding skeleton, but I’m really not a fan of Megabonk’s insistence on “memey” language that litters the game.
I get that the developer, Vedinad, is chronically online, and I’ve seen the TikToks about the game, but do I have to be subjected to it? I feel incredibly old whenever something pops up that’s clearly targeted at Gen Z or Alpha.
Maybe it’s my sense of humor clashing, but seeing “Cooked” in the difficulty meter during the final swarm feels incredibly unfunny. Seeing a “Scorpionussy” or “Chadbark”, or even my favorite character, Megachad, based on the meme of the very hunky man with a big chin, feels like it’s going to age the game far more than anything.
Megabonk Review Final Thoughts
Megabonk isn’t without its issues, but it’s reinvigorated my love for the Vampire Survivor style of game in a way that I didn’t really expect. The way the game ramps up constantly makes me want to see how far I can push it, and seeing its encouragement of that throughout just shows how much Vedinad understands these types of games.
4/5
| Megabonk | |
| Pros | Cons |
| Feels great to play, as the game piles on more enemies | Memey humor and references don’t make for good gags |
| Wants to be broken and provides the tools to do so | Would be nice if challenges weren’t just “harder enemies” |
| Tonnes to unlock | |
Platforms: PC
Developer: Vedinad
Publisher: Vedinad
Release date: September 18, 2025
