We need to define our terms. Vampire Survivors is such a new phenomenon that a genre name for it, and the many games it follows, has yet to be agreed upon. In fact, a lot of recent clones attempt to disguise things in ambiguous terms to hide the similarities, including things like reverse bullet hell and survival game with rogue-like elements.
The fact that these games are separate from those that are entirely automated is the key difference: these are games in which new abilities are stacked, each running on their own timers, firing off automatically. That's the consideration for inclusion here, although perhaps controversially, because I won't include the fantastic 20 Minutes Till Dawn.) We have to be specific. At a certain point this becomes a piece about Robotron-like characters.
So let's get things moving by nitpicking down some basics. horde games are a great start, and given that automatic is so crucial, why dont we agree on Automatic Horde Shooters? That's clever enough, because it opens the way for others to experiment far more interestingly on the form with concepts I've yet to see, like say a first-person Automatic Horde Shooter. Or a turn-based Automatic Horde Shooter.
Another flaw in the genre is the price. They're all incredible, unnecessarily cheap. VS set a strange standard by pricing itself at three dollars, and so many others have presumably complied. So you can pretty much buy everything in this list for half the price of one regular game.
Vampire Survivors isnt the first game to include these elements, and indeed you could trace its roots back to 1982's Robotron: 2084, let's take a look at a selection of games to grab when you've finally fed up with VS.