Beatdown City Survivors review: Bullet heaven, minus the bullets

NuChallenger is stepping into a new genre with its signature style and sound.

As Vampire Survivors developer Poncle expands into its own multifaceted empire of studios and genre-bending, the external gaming world continues to also use the “Bullet Heaven” thing as a springboard into… I was going to say “new ideas,” but perhaps that’s too generous. Anyway, “Bullet Heaven” is a genre now, and the latest drop in that space is a spinoff in the Beatdown City series. NuChallenger has taken its love for NES-style belt action brawlers and hip-hop music and culture, and translated it into something with “Survivors” in the title. As an exercise in genre-blending I appreciate what Beatdown City Survivors is going for, but I can’t say this plane makes the cleanest landing in the space.

Is Belt Action Heaven anything?

If you don’t know what Beatdown City is, here’s the watered-down pitch on this one. What if Vampire Survivors spoke in the language of Beat ‘em Ups like Final Fight or Streets of Rage? And on top of that, inject a serious dose of hip-hop culture, including a soundtrack entirely composed of indie rap, including playlist-like song credits that appear on screen like you have an MP3 player overlay. That’s pretty much it! There’s also a bunch of WWE references, indicating the folks at NuChallenger are really into wrestling on top of rap music. Makes sense. Anyway, while many Bullet Heaven games deal in weapons, powers, and other supernatural items, Beatdown City Survivors gives you all kinds of street level items and tools like boots and sneakers, brass knuckles, “steel” chairs, 2x4 boards, so on and so forth. You dig food and cash out of trash cans and other containers, and find upgrades at food trucks. The setting is presented just so, and that vibe is immaculate. The soundtrack is probably the best part, followed by one of the items being a pair of slippers you throw like a boomerang.

I admire how this game tries its best to introduce several nuances to set itself apart in an increasingly saturated space, and the start of that is an interesting split between “melee” and “weapon” damage. Your character’s basic attacks are inherent to that character, and the items they get from leveling up are weapons. They operate on different damage scales, and that’s something you have to consider while you’re working on your build. Each character’s melee abilities are also notably different, and factor into how you play because movement and positioning are so crucial. Characters have different, important aspects like range, speed, and knockback, and Survivors treats those as foundational elements for how you play those characters.

Annoyance of the Ooze

There’s also this weird system in the form of… goo? You can walk over different kinds of liquids that coat your character and enemies, assigning different kinds of properties, debuffs, and vulnerabilities to environmental hazards like fire or electricity. Interactions also mean you can interrupt one effect with another, such as cleaning poison or blood off yourself with water. This stuff is interesting for sure, but it ends up being more annoying than anything else as outside of specific character abilities, most of these just blended together in my mind as “hazards,” meaning I’d just avoid them all equally and seek out water if I ended up covered with something. It’s admittedly fun when you are playing as a relevant character though, such as a cat that gets a massive speed boost when it’s covered in blood.

Another gimmick lies in how you unlock characters. Rather than just unlocking them in their own menu, you have to encounter the characters out in the levels, where you first have to rescue them by fighting off enemies in a little circle. Then, you have to meet some kind of condition, be it dealing a specified amount of a specified damage type, keeping them alive for a certain amount of time, or simply helping them escape. There are other conditions too, but let's not type them all out here. Anyway, this is mostly a compelling twist, although sometimes the first part is a pain for reasons we'll get into shortly, and the second thing is bothersome because of some clumsy UI stuff. You can't actually check your mission objectives while you're in a level, which means the first time you encounter and rescue a character you just... can't see how to unlock them? So you can guess, or just not worry about it and let them follow you around until they die or whatever the first time then hunt them down again when you replay the stage. It's something I forsee being addressed in a patch, but it is what it is. For now, a snag!

Under the hood woes

The biggest problem this game has is math. While there are lots of good ideas and fun flavor in here, a lot of it doesn’t come together in ways that feel polished and/or cohesive. Melee damage is severely underrepresented in unlocks for example, making it feel quickly irrelevant as you play. Damage and HP feel over and under-cooked respectively, making you feel extremely vulnerable no matter what upgrades you invest in. This pairs awkwardly with levels not feeling like they ramp up difficulty-wise evenly, opting instead to have some kind of randomness involved (ostensibly) with how hordes of enemies are spawned in. The unfortunate result is certain characters just not feeling viable at all, like slower, melee-oriented ones who are supposed to be chunky tanks, but just get smooshed by AoE or range-spamming enemies if they happen to spawn in groups. Later on you get further layers of upgrades available beyond the initial ones, but that’s another math-related issue: too much grinding set too far apart to be satisfying to engage with.

Something about mid-run progress feels bad as well. You either level up really slowly, or there's something weird about the item pool. It's hard to tell, but either way, it was notably difficult to wrangle the build-crafting during a run in a way that felt unintentional. Runs are 20 minutes instead of the usual 30 in other similar games, so that could have been a factor as well. Either way, I found myself struggling to get more than a couple combinations set up, and never felt like I had a good handle on that cadence, even with XP upgrades. That's kind of the whole story with this game: things just feel off.

Beatdown City Survivors is an example of style succeeding while substance doesn’t. It’s not like the effort to have the substance isn’t here, it’s just the things on the table don’t have their intended impact. The overall balance just feels off, and it gets in the way of all the bits and pieces coming together as smoothly as, well, Vampire Survivors. When you have a bunch of systems and moving parts clanging together, if there’s a loose spoke in one of the wheels, the whole thing will start to wobble. Beatdown City isn’t so unstable that it topples over, especially thanks to the classic brawler framework and hip-hop style over top of everything. It’s worth checking out (especially if you know and like the other games), but it’s not going to ultimately stand out much in its own crowded space. Not for its mechanics, anyway.

Beatdown City Survivors is available on June 10, 2026 for PC and Xbox Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

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Review for
Beatdown City Survivors
7
Pros

• Awesome soundtrack
• Combining NES-style brawlers with the Vampire Survivors thing is a fun combo
• Lots of unlockable characters and upgrades

Cons

• Unique mechanics and systems are fumbly and annoying
• The math doesn't quite math, creating balance issues that stifle fun