Warhammer Survivors: Best Starting Champion and Mistakes New Players Make
Auroch Digital's Warhammer bullet-heaven launched November 10 with over 40 champions split across 40K and Age of Sigmar. Here's who to pick first, how the Squad system works, and what to skip early.
Warhammer Survivors turns the hobby itself into battlefield scenery, with paint pots and codexes doubling as pickups. Image: Auroch Digital.
Warhammer Survivors launched November 10 on Steam, GOG, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2, iOS and Android, and it is already the fastest way to lose two hours without noticing. Auroch Digital, the studio behind Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, built it in partnership with poncle, the team behind Vampire Survivors, and it shows: move your champion, watch the weapons fire themselves, and try not to get swallowed by a horde that keeps getting bigger. The roster tops 40 champions split across Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar, and the two universes never mix. Here is what actually matters in the first few runs.
Two Grimdark Armies, One Survivors Formula
Pick a champion from the Imperium, the Tyranids' victims, or Age of Sigmar's Mortal Realms, then hold a line while enemies swarm from every side. A 40K run throws Tyranid broods and the occasional Ork mob at you; an Age of Sigmar run throws Skaven hordes and Chaos warbands instead, and a given character can only ever fight on their own side of that split. Gold earned mid-run buys permanent upgrades through the Power Up menu between runs, and a separate Unlocks menu tracks what is still locked. The Steam page lists more than 75 weapons across the roster, and most of them evolve into stronger forms once you stack the right power-ups.
Pick Trooper Kozlowski First
Six champions are unlocked in the free demo and carry over into the full game: Malum Caedo, Trooper Kozlowski, Legend of Catachan, Neave Blacktalon, Ulgromthier and Lyssa Revenya. Kozlowski is the one to start with. He opens every run with a Lasgun, and his kit is built entirely around the game's Squad system, so a first run with him teaches the mechanic that every other champion depends on later. If you'd rather start on the Age of Sigmar side, Neave Blacktalon and her Whirlwind Axes are the safer first pick: straightforward damage, no follower management to juggle while you're still learning the controls.
Avoid Legend of Catachan as a first pick even though he's fast. His starting Frag Grenades alone are a thin opening with no immediate follow-up weapon, and newer players tend to get swarmed before his kit comes online.
How the Squad System Actually Works
You only ever directly control one champion. Everyone else on screen is a follower standing in for a weapon you've picked up, and followers can't take damage or collect pickups themselves, so losing one costs you a weapon slot, not a life. Every character and weapon carries keyword tags, and if you grab a weapon your current champion's keywords don't support, an ally who can use it joins automatically instead of the weapon doing nothing. That's deliberate: it's how the roster hands you combos like Kozlowski's Lasgun squad feeding the Castellan's follower-scaling damage, or Lorai's Nebulous Sea Fog dragging enemies into Bastian Carthalos's melee range.
Mistakes That Cost You a Run
A few character quirks aren't explained anywhere in the tutorial, and they'll burn a run if you don't know them going in:
- Marneus Calgar's Gauntlets of Ultramar summon doesn't fire while you're playing as Calgar himself, so don't build around it expecting extra damage.
- Gotrek Gurnisson doesn't spawn a clone of himself from effects that normally duplicate a champion, unlike most of the roster.
- Brother Luca's starting Boltgun evolves into a Heavy Bolter, but picking up Power Fists while playing him wastes the slot, since his summon won't use them.
- Ulgromthier starts every battle with a higher base health pool than the rest of the cast, which makes him the better pick if you keep dying in the first two minutes rather than the last two.
Paint Pots, Gold and What to Save For
Besides gold, runs scatter Warhammer paint pots across the battlefield, and some are rewarded for specific in-run feats instead. Pots unlock new character forms and secrets, and on top of that they can unlock hobby-table items as actual weapons and utility pickups, including an area-of-effect Nuln Oil pot, a random-damage Dice, and a range-extending Tape Measure. None of this carries over from the demo, so if you played the pre-launch demo, expect to start the full game's unlock tree from zero. Spend early gold on survivability upgrades in the Power Up menu before damage upgrades; champions in this genre die to getting surrounded far more often than they die to being underpowered.
The game launched at $7.99 on Steam, discounted 10% to $7.19 through November 17, and it's included in Xbox Game Pass on day one. Given the price and the demo's six free champions, there's no reason not to find out which squad you like before buying.