The Vampire Survivors loop is a specific trade: the game takes aiming away from you and gives you positioning and drafting instead, then it escalates until the screen is the enemy. Three games on Weekly Arcade run that loop, and one of them was built directly from it. All three are free, run in a browser tab, need no account to play and work offline once loaded.
3 that come close
- Swarm Surge Survive the swarm. Your guns handle the aiming.
What it shares. Built from Vampire Survivors and Brotato, and it keeps the defining mechanic intact: your weapons fire automatically toward the nearest enemy and your only job is to move and pick upgrades. Enemies escalate from Crawlers to Rushers, Tanks, Bombers and invisible Phantoms, named bosses arrive every 90 seconds, and each level-up offers three of a pool of 12 weapons and 8 passives with evolution unlocks on top.
How it differs. A run has an end. The Reaper arrives at 15 minutes and killing it is the only way to win, so this is a 15-minute run rather than an open-ended one. The roster is also smaller than the subject has grown to, and there is a 6-minute seeded Daily Challenge where every player faces the same waves.
- Voidbreak Smash asteroids. Upgrade. Go deeper.
What it shares. The same draft-under-pressure structure with a pool of 26 upgrades - 10 weapons, 10 passives and 6 score modifiers - taken one at a time after each wave. Several are trades rather than gifts, which is where the interesting decisions live: Risk and Reward gives triple score for the whole run in exchange for a life, taken immediately.
How it differs. You aim. It is Asteroids underneath, so thrust, rotation and shooting are all yours, and the enemies are asteroids breaking into smaller asteroids rather than a crowd closing in. Lives cap at five and collision costs one, so it punishes single mistakes rather than gradual encirclement.
- Duneburst Blocks shatter into flowing sand. Connect it wall to wall.
What it shares. Shares the escalating-draft skeleton: every third clear you take one of fifteen relics that permanently change the run, and runs last four to eight minutes, which is the same short-loop pacing.
How it differs. There is no combat at all. It is a sand-physics puzzle where pieces shatter into grains and you clear by connecting a colour wall to wall. It is on this page because our own Duneburst names Vampire Survivors as a reference point for its relic draft, not because it is an action game.
What the genre is actually called, and what to look for
These get called survivor-likes, bullet heavens or auto-shooters, and the label matters less than the two things that make one good.
The first is that the upgrade draft has real decisions in it. A pool where every option is a straight improvement is not a draft, it is a delay. Swarm Surge does this with weapon evolution pairs, so an upgrade can be worth taking now because it completes something later. Voidbreak does it with trades - Perfect Wave doubles a wave only if you take no damage in it, which changes how you play rather than what you have.
The second is that the escalation is legible. You should be able to see the run turning against you before it does. Swarm Surge puts named bosses on a 90-second clock so you always know what is coming; Voidbreak scales wave density, so the upgrades that multiply shots against clustered targets get better as the run goes on.
If you want the auto-attack specifically
Swarm Surge is the one. It is the only game here where the weapons genuinely fire themselves, which is the mechanic most people mean when they ask this question - the reason the genre feels different is that it moves your attention from aiming to standing in the right place.
Voidbreak is the pick if what you liked was the drafting rather than the hands-off shooting, because its pool is deeper in trades and its runs diverge harder.
- Weapons fire themselves - Swarm Surge.
- Deeper upgrade draft, but you aim - Voidbreak.
- The relic-draft structure without the combat - Duneburst.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free browser version of Vampire Survivors?
No. Vampire Survivors is a commercial game. Swarm Surge is a free browser game built from the same loop - auto-firing weapons, escalating swarms, three upgrade choices per level - rather than a port of it.
Which one has the auto-attack?
Swarm Surge. Your weapons fire automatically toward the nearest enemy and movement plus upgrade choices are the whole input. Voidbreak has the roguelite draft but you control aiming and shooting yourself.
How long is a run?
Swarm Surge runs to 15 minutes, when The Reaper arrives and killing it is the only way to win a run, and its Daily Challenge is a 6-minute seeded run. Voidbreak runs until you are out of lives, and Duneburst runs four to eight minutes.
Do they work on a phone?
Yes. Swarm Surge has a virtual joystick on mobile, and all three run in a mobile browser with no download and no account needed to play.