To say that Vampire Survivors has been influential is a massive understatement – it quite literally spawned an entire genre of bullet heaven/Survivors-likes. There’s an argument to be made for and against that being a good thing, but there’s no denying that the game itself is stellar. The sheer dopamine of it all makes it a perfect game to just hop in and out of, but at its core, you’re doing the same thing and just watching numbers go up. It makes the brain happy. So, can Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors pull off the same kind of trick?
Vampire Crawlers naturally finds itself in a strange place. It has to follow-up an intensely simple game which had such a massive impact, and to be honest, I don’t think it’s nailed it to anywhere near the same degree. I like Vampire Crawlers well enough, but I don’t love it, and I think it’s because the simplicity of Vampire Crawlers is going to be stacked up against the broader genres of deckbuilder roguelites that includes the recently released Slay the Spire 2.
Now, to be fair, this is specifically a dungeon-crawler instead of just a roguelike, so you’re delving into different levels and navigating around them in first-person, picking which fights you want to take on to try and get stronger, and which ones you want to avoid because it’s not worth it. And the deck that you’re playing from features cards taken from Vampire Survivors itself, all with different effects like buffing you, dealing damage, or letting you draw more cards.
The main thing to pay attention to in each battle is your combo. From the hand that you draw from your deck each turn, the aim is to play a zero cost card first, then a one mana card, then a two mana card, and so on. Keeping your combo up can double the effects of your cards, making them substantially more powerful and dispatching enemies more quickly and hopefully before they can even deal damage to you.
Each time you level up on a run, you get a choice of cards to add to your deck, balancing between damage types, buffs and characters, and that naturally affects the likelihood of drawing suitable cards. You can also augment them as you go with gems, which might do something like add a buff, double the damage, or evolve them, a la Vampire Survivors.
You’re not just delving into levels for the sake of it, but to advance and get new levels and unlocks. Just as with Vampire Survivors, you’re practically assaulted with unlocks and achievement as you play, netting dozens of them on your first few successful runs, once again triggering all of those happy hormones. However, that’s sort of it. Vampire Crawlers is a lot of fun, but it’s also a game I don’t feel like is doing much more to go beyond that simple loop. It leads to a game that feels pretty samey after the first few levels and attempts, even as you work through the massive amounts of unlocks and stuff to do. The music does slap, though.
