Vampire Crawlers Review: The perfect evolution for Vampire Survivors

Vampire Crawlers gives the series’ roguelite formula a serious shot in the arm: tangible gameplay.

Vampire Survivors was a sensation when it launched in 2022, and it has singlehandedly turned developer Poncle into a globe-spanning multi-studio operation. It was a massive success, and that’s partially because of how simple it was to play. In Vampire Survivors, you know your build is effective if you don’t actually have to touch the controller. Putting together a strong survivor as you delve through dungeons was undeniably satisfying, but the lengthy runs with little required input became tiring.

Vampire Crawlers takes everything that worked about Survivors – the visuals, themes, procedural dungeons, and a strong sense of progression – and infuses it with gameplay. While in Survivors, success allows you to put down the controller, in Crawlers, it means you’ll be pressing more buttons than ever.

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors (yes, that is the full title) is a deck-building roguelite where you’ll aim to build a deck with decent synergy in each run. There are several stages, each with different areas within them holding new rewards and steeper difficulties, and within each dungeon, you’ll navigate a small map filled with enemies, items, and treasures.

The goal is to get to the end of each stage with your chosen Crawlers while picking up loot and achieving mini challenges along the way. Progress happens fast, with your first few runs earning you countless new unlockables to equip and purchase, and every coin you earn can be spent on power-ups to enhance your next adventure. It’s a constant loop of exploring and upgrading, and effectively pushes you into playing for hours on end.

But that would all be meaningless if the core gameplay didn’t hit — and it hits. Each turn, you’ll be attempting to string combos together with the cards in your hand, playing them roughly in order of their mana cost. First, you’ll play a 0-cost card, then a 1-cost, then a 2, and so on until you run out of mana, with playing a card in a combo greatly enhancing its results.

Your chosen Crawlers will have their own abilities, which enhance certain card types and effects, and they’ll also dictate which cards you start with. Those are the things you’ll keep in mind for every run, but the magic of Vampire Crawlers is that you can build totally unique decks every time you play. In one run, I focused solely on amassing EXP and levelled up massively, in another I combined Attractorb and Tome cards to keep extending my turn, and in yet another I used Bone cards to wipe out an absurd number of foes in record time.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Certain Crawlers synergise better with certain colour cards – red for attack cards, blue for armor cards, yellow for effect cards, etc. – and you can enhance those synergies even further with jewels. Many cards come with jewel slots that allow you to stack additional effects – you can slot an Attractorb jewel into a Knife card to have it perform both actions, for example – and you can even spend your earned coins to increase the number of jewel slots cards have at the Blacksmith, once you unlock it.

“It’s this flexibility that makes Vampire Crawlers the kind of game you want to keep playing.”

The jewels can be incredibly effective, even having the ability to turn a card of your choice into a Wildcard, which can be played at any time, for no mana cost, and will always combo into the next card you use. There’s nothing stopping you from making a high-level Tome card – which increases your mana – into a Wildcard, and adding jewels to make it draw cards or do damage, setting you up for the rest of the battle.

It’s this flexibility that makes Vampire Crawlers the kind of game you want to keep playing. Sometimes I would go into a run with no plan whatsoever, and I’d just let the cards and bonuses I found dictate my strategy going forward — and sometimes it’d even work. Each run felt like an opportunity to discover a new item or tick off one of the dozens of smaller challenges Vampire Crawlers present you with. Runs start reasonably short and breezy, but they get longer thanks to tougher foes, and it happens just as you’ll get the urge to push your deck builds further.

Each stage is hiding Relics that’ll allow you to upgrade the Village you use as a home base, and each Relic unlocks something that’ll change how you play the game, whether that’s new Crawlers to use, power-ups to purchase, or new buildings in the Village – like the aforementioned Blacksmith – that’ll allow you to dial in your deck builds and strategies.

Even though there’s currently just a small handful of stages to actually play through, there’s a massive amount of replayability thanks to the different Crawlers you can unlock, the lengthy list of challenges, and the countless deck builds you can craft in each. And if Vampire Survivors is any indicator, Vampire Crawlers is likely to get DLC for the fans that can’t get enough.

I have to congratulate the development team, too. Sure, a straight Vampire Survivors sequel would’ve been safer, but Vampire Crawlers feels like a statement of intent, in terms of game design. Survivors’ best builds left me feeling braindead as I held the controller, but Crawlers’ builds have me constantly thinking of the best way to utilise my available mana to take down foes and survive. I’m now far more excited about the prospect of 15 new projects in development at Poncle, thanks to Vampire Crawlers being such a smart step forward for the series.

Boiling down the improvements and additions here down to “tangible gameplay” is reductive, in all honesty, but Vampire Crawlers has kept my hands on the controller and my eyes on the screen for much longer than Survivors was ever capable of. The team already had an engaging upgrade loop, and now Vampire Crawlers makes each of your decisions feel that much more valuable. On every front, it’s a success story.