Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard From Vampire Survivors is a complex roguelike deckbuilder with one goal in mind: delivering satisfying mechanics.
The game’s title invites the most obvious comparison—Vampire Survivors vs. Vampire Crawlers. Crawlers achieves impressive results by bringing in some of the best parts of Survivors’ classic visual style, snappy music, sense of humor, and “number goes up” gameplay—while making it more accessible through a turn-based system.
Both games are about building an engine and letting it run. Finding weapons that complement each other and your character, building your power by leveling up during runs, and filling the entire screen with projectiles and damage numbers while (hopefully) not dying. Vampire Crawlers does a surprisingly good job of recreating that feeling as a deck builder. Using a weapon at a low-power level will fire off a few projectiles relatively slowly. Building up your combo and increasing your “amount” stat to fire more projectiles will fill the screen with attacks. There’s no timer on playing cards, and methodical play will still generate visual excess.
The game has many systems at play, which we’ll discuss in varying levels of detail. The main thing I want to convey is that I think the game does an excellent job of timing your access to new systems. The tutorial is easy to grasp, and big new things only get added one at a time, though less transformative unlocks will come constantly. The basic gameplay loop is to buy upgrades, choose your starting Crawler in town, make it as far into a dungeon as you can, unlock new things, and then do it again. The Village Hub has an Unlocks menu, which will show you exactly what you need to do in order to get your new tools. You can also hide challenges you’ve already completed from the list, keeping it nice and easy to go through.
The titular Crawlers form the kernel of your deck. Each one comes with a set of stat bonuses (things like extra mana, a bonus to might, maybe a larger hand size), a few starter cards, and a unique combination of abilities. Playing a Crawler causes an immediate effect and a long-term effect you can trigger by playing a specific card type. Antonio gives you 3 armor when played but will also give you +10 might for the rest of the battle if you play a red card while he’s active.
Vampire Crawlers unfortunately does not have any color blindness options, but card color types are at least easy to figure out (red are weapons, blue are armor or healing, etc.). Some Crawlers are found inside coffins in the dungeons, while others require completing a thematic unlock challenge. Early game you’ll only be able to field one Crawler at a time. Later on you’ll be able to field multiple Crawlers and increase the duration of their ongoing effects.
Power-ups are straightforward permanent increases to your various stats, which you can purchase with gold earned in the dungeons. Extra gold, extra strength, starting armor, and so on up to revives. You can refund all your power-ups with no penalty, which is great for trying out new builds. Unfortunately, you can only refund all the power-ups at once. It would be much nicer to be able to de-level them one at a time, instead of having to rebuy everything anytime you want to make one small adjustment.
The most core gameplay element is the combo. Every card has a mana cost. When playing cards in order by their cost, you will generate a combo that increases the effect of played cards. You start with relatively few options for combos. In the first couple of dungeons, you’ll be able to play 0 to 1 to 2, 2 to 3, and not much else. Later in the game you’ll be able to extend combos essentially indefinitely by using Wild Cards (no mana cost and can be considered any number for combo purposes).
Some cards are natively Wild, while some can be made Wild through the gem upgrade system. Cards will come with a certain number of gem slots that can be filled by earning gems during runs. Gems themselves reset after each run, but eventually you can purchase card upgrades to permanently increase the number of gem slots in specific cards. Gems range from straightforward damage multipliers to more complicated effects like adding additional color types so they can trigger more Crawler effects.
Early game you’re making simple decisions based on moment-to-moment survival. Eventually you’ll figure out a combination of tools that makes the next couple of levels trivial. Then it’ll get harder again—just enough to make you reconsider your strategy. Or maybe you’ll struggle through one area before unlocking something that blows it wide open. I do truly enjoy how much the game allows you to “break” the system before showing you that actually you just did what you needed to do, and now you need to break it again.
My experience is that there is also a meta element to the power fantasy in which you basically never need to try a level a second time once you have just a couple of hours of experience. Your permanent stat boosts and unlocked bonuses can eventually trivialize every challenge the game has. Your enjoyment of the game will map very closely to how much you enjoy that escalation.
Verdict
Vampire Crawlers is a relatively brisk experience. A player with some deck builder experience is probably looking at about 13 hours to complete every stage and most, if not all, of the challenges. Less experienced players should be fine, though—the game guides you through new systems one-by-one in a way that feels very intuitive.
It brings some new ideas to the genre but doesn’t have a huge amount of staying power in its current form—feeling a bit empty when compared to the well-supported Vampire Survivors. But if Vampire Crawlers can keep enough player interest to justify even half the DLC of Vampire Survivors, then I think we will be looking at a genre staple with years of staying power.
