A Beginner's Guide to Warhammer Survivors' Champions, Weapons, and Evolutions
Warhammer Survivors launched today on PC and consoles. Here is how its champions, weapon evolutions, and Extremis Bosses actually work in your first runs.
Warhammer Survivors is out now on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and mobile, and it drops new players into the 41st Millennium and the Mortal Realms with very little explanation. The game is a licensed collaboration between Auroch Digital, the Bristol studio behind Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, and poncle, the team behind Vampire Survivors. The structure is familiar to anyone who has played a bullet-heaven game before: pick a champion, move around an arena while your weapons fire automatically, and survive as long as possible while the horde grows. What is new here is more than 40 characters pulled from Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, each with their own stats and starting weapon, plus a crafting-adjacent system for merging weapons into stronger forms. Here is what to know before your first run.
Picking Your First Champion
Every character in Warhammer Survivors comes from an established Warhammer faction and carries a unique weapon and starting stats, so your first choice shapes how a run plays out more than it would in most games in the genre. Malum Caedo, the chainsword-wielding Space Marine imported directly from Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, is built around melee range and aggressive positioning. Kozlowski, a Cadian Shock Trooper from the Astra Militarum, and Brother Luca, a Space Marine Intercessor, both lean on ranged bolter fire and reward players who kite enemies rather than wade into them.
On the Age of Sigmar side, Neave Blacktalon and Sharynn Azurwrath are Stormcast Eternals who fight the Skaven horde; Azurwrath's starting celestial greatsword covers a wide arc and is a forgiving pick for a first attempt, since it clears the weaker Skaven swarms around your character without much aiming. If a run feels unwinnable in the opening minutes, the character is usually the problem before the build is: a ranged starter paired with poor positioning habits will struggle far more than a wide-swinging melee champion would in the same spot.
Building Your Arsenal: Weapons and Evolutions
The game ships with an arsenal of more than 75 weapons, from the standard Boltgun and Astartes Chainsword to the Whirlwind Axes and a handful of deliberate jokes, including a usable pot of Citadel Nuln Oil. Weapons are earned mid-run from the same level-up pool as passive power-ups, and the system that matters most is evolution: pairing a specific base weapon with the right passive power-up transforms it into a stronger, screen-clearing version once both are sufficiently upgraded.
- Prioritize upgrading one or two weapons to their maximum level early rather than spreading points thinly across four or five options.
- Check which passive a weapon wants before picking it up blind; an evolution that needs a specific power-up is wasted if that power-up never appears in your level-up choices.
- Keep at least one crowd-control weapon active at all times. Tyranid swarms and Skaven hordes both overwhelm through sheer numbers rather than individual danger, so a wide hit-area weapon matters more than raw single-target damage.
Runs that stall around the ten-minute mark are almost always a sign that no weapon has evolved yet. If that happens repeatedly with the same champion, switch which weapon you commit to upgrading first rather than restarting with the same plan.
Surviving the Swarm: Stages and Enemy Factions
Warhammer Survivors splits its content into stages drawn from across both licensed settings, from the open, ash-choked plains of Aqshy to the tight, claustrophobic corridors of an abandoned Space Hulk. Each stage is tied to a specific enemy faction and has its own layout quirks: open plains favor ranged champions who can kite in wide circles, while Space Hulk corridors box melee champions in with the horde, which can work in their favor if their weapon already covers a wide arc.
The two enemy factions revealed so far are the Tyranids, whose swarms lean on raw numbers and fast, weak units, and the Skaven, whose warpstone-addled hordes mix in tougher ranged attackers between the chaff. Learning which stage pits you against which faction before committing to a run helps you pick a champion suited to that stage rather than discovering the mismatch five minutes in.
Facing Down Extremis Bosses
Standard stage bosses are survivable with almost any reasonably upgraded build, but Auroch Digital has built a second, harder tier into the game called Extremis Bosses, including the Great Unclean One, the ork warlord Ghazghkull Thraka, and the Skaven prophet Vizzik Skour. The developer's own description calls them a challenge even for Survivors-like veterans, and that holds up in practice: these fights expect a weapon that has already evolved at least once and a character whose kit covers both close and mid range, since Extremis Bosses mix melee lunges with projectile attacks that punish players who only built for one or the other.
If an Extremis Boss is wiping runs consistently, the fix is rarely "get better at dodging." It is almost always to bank gold between runs first. Gold collected during a stage carries over and permanently strengthens future attempts, so a few deliberately short runs focused on gold collection before trying again against a specific boss will do more than repeating the same loadout against a wall.
Where to Play, Price, and the Demo
Warhammer Survivors is priced at $7.99 on Steam and GOG, with a 10% launch discount bringing it to $7.19 for a limited window, and it is also available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, iOS, and Android. Xbox players get it on Game Pass from day one. A free Steam demo remains available for anyone who wants to try two of the playable champions before buying, and progress from the demo does not carry over into the full release.
For a genre built on short, repeatable runs, that demo is worth the ten minutes it takes to confirm whether the moment-to-moment feel clicks before spending anything. Beyond that, the fastest way to get comfortable is simply to lose a few runs on purpose with different champions early, since the starting weapon and stats tell you more about how a character plays than any menu description does.
Official links
Sam writes about small studios and the games they ship against the odds, and turns the hardest parts of them into guides that get to the point.
