So I've been playing some Vampire Survivors and games like it.

Good games: Vampire Survivors itself, 20 Minutes to Dawn, Holocure, Project Lazarus. Not great: Soulstone Survivors, Spirit Hunters.
I'll talk about why inside this plurk.

I'll elaborate on this more

This is just my opinions.

Vampire Survivors is the famous example of this genre, we'll use it as a baseline.

It's a creative game, not many games do stuff like the pentagram weapon

There's plenty to discover in this game, the weapons are decently distinct, and the weapon evolutions often change the weapon in neat ways.

The core gameplay loop is fun.

VS is also getting DLC next week

Holocure is a creative take on this formula with each character's signature weapon and skills making them pretty distinct from each other. Suitable for a game about famous and distinctive personas.

Also it adds spice by adding aoe attacks to stages to dodge. The story premise is simple but fun.

The passive items are more interesting than those of Vampire Survivors and since weapon evolutions fuse weapons instead of requiring specific passive items, you can just choose ones that fit the vtuber you're playing as.

20 Minutes to Dawn is the biggest departure of the actually good (in my opinion) games.

No automatic attacks and attacking slows down your movement which fits with the more horror/eldritch tone of the game.

Weapons are decently creative and the character special abilities are fun to play with

Instead of weapons and items you choose skills/traits that modify various aspects of your gameplay like making you attack faster, adding a chance to trigger status effects, making lighting strike every two attacks, or triggering an effect when you shoot your last bullet (did I mention there's a reloading mechanism) and much more.

Skills come in related group of four, like there's a group for setting your foes on fire.

It's a fun creative game that just doesn't have much content currently but such is playing still in development games.

The permanent upgrades are pretty interesting too and you can only choose one out of three to be active in each tier in the two offensive/defensive upgrade trees

Project Lazarus is a mecha take on the genre

Each mecha has different stats, weapon/passive slots, and a trait.

There're three different types of weapon slots and different weapons to go with them

And permanent upgrades bump up the starting levels of your weapons and passive upgrades

Also you can equip multiple of the same weapon or passive if you have the slots for it.

The weapons are a decent lot with plenty to set them different.

Also something wild is how some mecha have a different piloting schema

Overall it's an interesting take but still in early development

I'll talk later about what the two I didn't like as much did that made me like them less