Vampire Survivors took the world by storm in 2022, annihilating countless waves of enemies and hours of our time as it popularized the “bullet heaven” genre of auto-shooter and spawned dozens of imitators. Slay the Spire, which catalyzed its own genre explosion for roguelike deckbuilders back in 2019, is buzzy again with its sequel in early access, so there’s something appropriate about the timing of new spin-off Vampire Crawlers adapting the original Vampire Survivors into that beloved genre space.

That initially seems totally at odds—Vampire Survivors is a twitchy, fast-paced, hypnotic arcade game with minimal inputs and an overwhelming sensory rush from big, flashing numbers and gems flying everywhere, whereas roguelike deckbuilders are methodically turn-based, systemic, and decision-intensive. Vampire Crawlers deftly bridges that gap, translating the core mechanical and aesthetic ideas of Vampire Survivors into a roguelite deckbuilding dungeon crawler with both style and substance in excess.

Historically, genre-shifted spin-off projects like this tend to be of a smaller scale than the core game in the IP, but since Vampire Survivors was initially a solo project by poncle, Vampire Crawlers bucks that trend because it’s been developed by a whole team, and it shows. It’s quite a bit more fully featured at release than its progenitor, from the charm of its immersive first-person menus to the unfolding depths of its mechanical systems.

Up Close and Personal

In the original Vampire Survivors, you pick a character that starts with a particular item and stat modification/special ability, and move around a map in top-down 2D with your attacks automatically firing regularly. Waves of enemies of increasing number and strength come at you, dropping experience on death. When you level up, you select one from several items, either strengthening something you already have or adding a new item to your build. Then it’s a race between the increasing tides of ghoulies and your ability to construct a build that wipes them out at pace, until you either lose or 30 minutes pass and Death shows up to end your run.

Vampire Crawlers keeps that same overall shape, but changes perspective, makes it turn-based, and at every point injects more interesting decisions for you to make. It also reuses all of the items, icons, enemies, zones, stats, etc., from Survivors as its raw material, but so totally recontextualized that it feels both cozily familiar and fresh.

You navigate the run from a first-person dungeon crawling perspective akin to classic “blobber” RPGs like the Might & Magic and Wizardry series. Runs through a given level are typically broken up into 5 floors, which you can see on a map in the lower part of your screen labeling the locations of enemies, items, the floor boss, etc. Since you have full knowledge of each floor from the start, you can plot out the order in which you want to tackle things. In Vampire Survivors, certain upgrade locations are visible from the start, so Crawlers extends that into a more strategic way for you to break down the whole level.

The character you choose (here a Crawler) determines your starting deck of 4 cards, one of which is the Crawler themself. These are sort of akin to the eponymous commander cards from Magic: The Gathering’s most popular format. Crawlers have both an immediate impact on your stats when played and also stay out for a while with an ongoing effect that you typically want to build your deck around, such as drawing a card or boosting a stat whenever you play cards of a particular color.

Like Survivors, you can also spend gold earned during runs to unlock new Crawlers and buy permanent stat upgrades, along with new meta-progressions like adding additional improvement slots to cards you’ve unlocked, or selecting Arcana with powerful additional effects on your run.

Rising Action

The biggest increase in complexity from Survivors to Crawlers comes in combat. The broad outline will be familiar to anyone who’s played Slay the Spire and its ilk: each turn you have a finite amount of energy with which to play out a hand of cards, discarding any unplayed cards at the end of the turn and drawing a fresh hand, reshuffling your discards back into the deck whenever you run out. Cards include both the familiar weapons of Survivors (daggers, holy water, garlic, etc.) doing damage in various configurations, and the other stat upgrades (candles, books, spinach, etc.) doing things like boosting your stats, but also drawing cards, regaining mana, and the like.

The big, juicy, mechanical hook that really makes combat and deckbuilding sing is that you want to play cards in ascending order of cost. Each time you do, you tick up a multiplier that amplifies the effect of nearly every card you play, so playing 0- and 1-cost cards first means that big, climactic 2-cost attack will hit a lot harder. This is easy to optimize when your deck is just the same few cards that you see every turn, but gets increasingly tricky to maintain and scale up as your deck necessarily bloats with new,  more powerful cards to meet the rising challenge (cards that draw, add mana, and/or have a wild cost that’s both free and lets you continue the chain with anything are your best friend).

Vampire Survivors felt most satisfying when you managed to line up synergistic build choices and watched the hordes just crumble in front of you. Vampire Crawlers still gives you that macro satisfaction of making an effective build, but also the turn-by-turn pleasure of executing it. The finite card and energy economy and predictable rhythm of playing cards with successively higher costs means that you don’t have to agonize too much over how best to play most turns, but it feels really good when you start stringing together longer chains.

For all my talk about decision-making, Vampire Crawlers also keeps the spirit of its forbear by playing smoothly and as blazing fast as you want. Animations stack as you play cards, so you can just blitz through every hand once you’ve built a well-oiled machine (or just play impulsively fast and loose from the start, though you might run into a wall as the challenge ratchets up). Like the original, the complexity and variety of options at your disposal increases over time as you find relics that add new systems and work your way through a long list of in-game achievements that unlock new items, crawlers, gems to slot into cards, etc., to populate future runs.

Vampire Crawlers is both a fun twist on Vampire Survivors and an interesting roguelite deckbuilder in its own right. I put a lot of hours into Survivors when I mostly wanted to turn my brain off, but I suspect I might put quite a few more into Crawlers in the long run because of how pleasantly it engages my mind while still scratching a similar basic itch.

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors is available today on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Play Anywhere, and Game Pass.

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

Poncle Limited

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

$9.99

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Xbox Game Pass

In a dark world, a new adventure begins. Explore maps, level up powers, kill monsters. Find treasures.

From the somehow triple-BAFTA‑winning creators of Vampire Survivors, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors turns the snowballing thrill of Survivors into a hyper turn‑based, card‑driven BLOBBER with rogue-lite elements. Build busted decks, explore familiar dungeons from a new perspective, and unleash world‑ending combos. Either take your time and be tactical, or play turns as fast as you humanly can: The outcome is always accurate, we call it hyper for a reason!

What is this game about
Snowballing, turn‑based carnage: Play cards in ascending mana order to land combos; each step multiplies the next card’s effect. Use Wilds to extend the stack and keep going to 10, 20, 30… Can you reach infinite?
Pick your pace: Either take your time and be tactical, or play turns as fast as you humanly can: The outcome is always accurate, we call it hyper for a reason!
Deck-Building: Accumulate experience and level up to gain new cards, headbutt chests for customization gems and power‑ups; chase weapon evolutions and summon survivors to trigger cascade of effects and break the game.
Crawling: Explore multi‑floor dungeons packed with something seldom seen in Vampire Survivors: functioning walls. And then all sorts of unique treasures and interactions. Find the shovel to dig into the next floor, that will most likely take place in the clouds!

Starting Tips:
– Try different Crawlers, each one changes your deck.
– Visit the village after every run and remember to buy Power-Ups.
– Play cards in ascending mana to trigger combos.