The key art for "Vampire Crawlers."

poncle/Nosebleed Interactive

I was curious to see how developer poncle would follow up its 2022 hit, Vampire Survivors. It was a fresh take on the auto-hit mechanic to create an experience that kept me obsessed. To everyone’s surprise, poncle and Nosebleed Interactive created a spin-off deck-building dungeon crawler that’s just as fantastic. Even in a hugely crowded genre, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors (what a mouthful) manages to translate Vampire Survivors’ unique gameplay mechanics to make it stand out.

In Vampire Crawlers, you have to go through different dungeons while picking up random power ups from treasure chests and battling enemies. During enemy encounters, you attack the front row, and then the enemies towards the back will come closer as you continue wiping them out. It’s a really clever way that translates Vampire Survivors’ wave-based gameplay into a card-battling structure.

You can pick from a cast of characters, each with their own special abilities. For example, Imelda gains XP growth every time she plays a yellow card, and Arca gains one mana point when a purple card is played. More characters can be found and unlocked as you progress the game. While characters add quite a bit of range in how to approach runs, the descriptions of their abilities aren’t always entirely clear. It can discourage experimentation and make you stick with ones you’re already familiar with. Given how fast-paced battles are, it can be hard to detect when abilities trigger, and they feel more like afterthoughts. As you get farther into dungeons, the abilities have less of an impact.

At first, you’ll start off with some weak cards, but as you level up, you can choose from a variety of different rewards such as new cards or abilities that can augment your weaker ones. Initially, it might not seem like much, but you’d be surprised at how powerful you can become. The progression feels natural and earned, especially when you wipe out monsters in later dungeons.

The basic strategy is that you want to play your cards in sequential order depending on how much mana they cost. You have to play methodically in order to maximize your combos. So if you have a card with a mana cost of zero, you’ll want to play that first before playing the ones that cost one point of mana, two points of mana, and so forth. The higher your combo, the higher the damage multiplier, and mastering the combo system is the key to dishing out huge amounts of damage against harder enemies and bosses.

There’s also a huge variety of different ways to build your deck too. In one run, I attached a Quick Draw trait to my Weighty Tome so that it’d be the first card that’d show up in my hand, letting me increase my mana right off the bat in battle. In another run, I slapped a Wild Card trait onto my Forever Heart card, which meant I could play it in any order without ruining my combo, and it permanently increased my max HP by one point every time. I was nigh invincible with over 200 HP. It’s just so satisfying when you create a winning strategy out of the cards you’re dealt.

As you clean out dungeons, you’ll earn money to spend back at the village for permanent upgrades. These include restoring some HP after every encounter, or increasing your stats for every rank you reach. These instill a sense of progression that makes it feel that even if you die, you didn’t waste your time. You can also spend money on unlocking more slots on cards to add even more augments, as well as change how often you come across certain power ups, giving you more control over your runs.

In later dungeons, a single run can go on for absurd amounts of time. I’m talking about upwards to two hours. It can feel incredibly exhausting to spend that much amount of time in just one dungeon. Thankfully, unlike Vampire Survivors, you can save and leave Vampire Crawlers without losing your progress in dungeons. It’s a welcome quality-of-life feature that gives you a break so you can come back with a refreshed state of mind.

I also played Vampire Crawlers entirely on Steam Deck, and performance was pretty much flawless. It’s the perfect game to take with you on the go.

Vampire Crawlers is an exceptional game that manages to retain its progenitor’s frantic gameplay while putting an invigorating twist that’ll keep you glued to the screen. Its simple mechanics are surprisingly deep, but also quite easy to get a hang of. There are so many secret unlockables which will keep players busy for a long time, and every second is just a joyous bloodbath of pixelated fun.

Score: 9

Played on: PC/Steam Deck

Disclosure: poncle/Nosebleed Interactive sent a copy of the game for the purposes of this review