Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

It's in that realization that Vampire Crawlers begins to reveal its true end goal: making you smile as you dispense pure carnage.

There are moments of fun, especially towards the end, but too often I just wanted to ram a garlic-flavoured stake through Vampire Crawlers repetitive, grindy heart.

Vampire Crawlers elevates an otherwise simple but highly entertaining card game with sensations more reminiscent of a casino (or Vampire Survivors) or the blinding blue light of doomscrolling late at night to create a retro-inspired diversion that’s hard to put down.

Vampire Crawlers’ deck-building gameplay is incredibly smart, and the runs never feel like they stretch for too long. It takes every smart decision made in Vampire Survivors and translates it beautifully to a new style of gameplay. Even if you’re not usually a fan of roguelites or deck-builders, you need to try Vampire Crawlers.

But even for now, on day one, it’s 100 percent worth every cent…especially if you put a bunch of time into the demo like I did, since the game carries over all of that progress. Seriously. I launched Vampire Crawlers and had 46 Steam achievements at the ready.

Like Survivors, Vampire Crawlers has a wealth of things to unlock along with permanent upgrades to give you a boost. Early on, things can feel a bit limited, but after putting in a couple of hours, you'll start to see far more, like whole new features in the hub, and new rewards waiting in each stage.

If you're going to create a deckbuilder out of Vampire Survivors, I think Vampire Crawlers is pretty much exactly the result you'd hope for – minus some bugs. It combines all of the weapons and power-ups from the first game with clever fusions and twists on traditional deckbuilding tentpoles.Even things that are annoying - not being able to check your deck when selecting upgrade and, hard to track damage numbers - feel like quirks of the franchise. It scratches my brain in a familiar way, and the euphoric feeling of creating a broken build still feels great.

Where it hits is all in how its trademark style and systems translate, the snappy card combat, and of course the banging soundtrack I’m only just mentioning because I’m not great at talking about music. So a thumbs-up from me, but one that comes with an acute sadness at how much more Vampire Crawlers could have been if it had true blobber bona fides.

The next roguelike game from Vampire Survivors developer poncle is just as fast-paced and addictive as its predecessor, with a deck-building twist.

Vampire Crawlers perfectly blends the style of Vampire Survivors with dungeon crawler mechanics, with an identity and an idea that will be hard to replicate in the future.