Verdict
Vampire Crawlers is an almost hypnotic roguelike card game that pulls you in and doesn’t let you go until you clear the credits. You might have to deal with one or two performance issues here or there, but the hyper-engaging core gameplay, a reliable autosave system, and some lovely PS1-style visuals make it all worthwhile.
Roguelike card games are a problem for me. You see, there's a bunch of things I'd like to do with my life. I want to write a novel. I want to learn how to play the piano. I want to see the world. But if you put a roguelike card game in front of me, all of that goes out the window. All I can think about is the next run, the next unlock, or the next build. So, when offered the chance to take on our Vampire Crawlers review, I accepted with caution. I realize now that I made a mistake. I made a wonderful, wonderful mistake.
For those who don't know, Vampire Crawlers is a spin-off of one of the most popular indie games of the last decade, Vampire Survivors. It has a lot of the same characters, items, and locations, but with two key differences: the player POV and the gameplay fundamentals. Vampire Survivors was essentially an idle roguelike, spawning a whole Survivors-like genre of its own, but Crawlers is a card-based dungeon-crawling roguelike. Imagine if you crossed Balatro with Dungeon Master, but with a whole lot more chaos than either of those games can muster.
Things feel different to Vampire Survivors right from the off, as, after the quick tutorial, you wind up in the Village, Crawler's main hub. This is where you pay to unlock new characters and weapon upgrades while also tracking your unlocks and any Arcana cards in your collection. The Village is one of the many ways in which Crawlers feels more fleshed out than Survivors, as it ties all your achievements into the gameplay experience rather than outside of it in the main menu. It's a charming little hub, even if I don't usually spend much time appreciating it, picking up any upgrades as quickly as possible before diving headfirst into the next run.
While Survivors was essentially a race against the clock, Crawlers is a bit more old-school in that each run is made up of a selection of levels, with a mini-boss at the end of each and a big boss to take down before the reaper comes calling. Dungeons vary in length but tend to range from three to five floors, with a couple of exceptions, so you can get through them in around the same amount of time as you would their Vampire Survivors equivalents. There are also a few bridges, which function like one long dungeon packed with violent waves of enemies, to contend with as you make your way across the in-game map.
Now, onto the meat of the gameplay, the card-based battling. I love it. Each weapon from the original game is now a red card with a mana cost. For example, Magic Wand is a 0-cost card, Runetracer is a 1-cost card, and so on. Passive items from the original game are split into three groups. You've got yellow cards to boost your stats or draw cards, such as Spinach and Attractorb; purple cards for boosting mana; and blue cards for armor. Plus, there are the teal-colored Crawler cards themselves. Every character has an associated Crawler card, which varies in effect, from increasing your draw power to boosting your damage output. All the cards I've mentioned so far have their own cost, and I'm about to get into why that's important.
Vampire Crawler's core mechanic is the Combo Stack system, which is attached to a relic you find in the tutorial. Essentially, you want to play cards in order of their cost to boost your combo, which in turn deals more damage. You only start with a finite amount of mana, though - two, to be precise, during your early runs and before any shop upgrades. If you've got a mind for game design, you'll notice that here you've got two very crucial concepts: limitation and potential. It's getting around the limits and unlocking the potential of the cards in your hand that make this game so ludicrously engaging.
To make achieving high-level combos easier, there's one more type of card I haven't mentioned yet: the wildcard. What makes wildcards different from the rest is that they don't cost anything to play and fit in at any point in your current combo, extending it further still. For example, you can play a 2-cost card into a 3-cost, then a wildcard, and a 0-cost after that, and it'll keep your combo going. You know how I was talking about potential before? Well, wildcards are the true key to unlocking the almost limitless potential of possible combos. Without them, you won't get much higher than x2 or x3 scores, but if you use them right, in tandem with yellow Attractorb cards for drawing and purple cards for boosting mana, I've achieved combos as high as x27, and god, does it feel good.
The Combo Stack system is just one half of what makes Vampire Crawlers feel so good to play, though. The other half of this game's engrossing concoction is the Turboturn mechanic, which allows you to play one card after another in quick succession without waiting for animations to end. It's hard to explain just how much Turboturn enhances the experience, but the best way I can put it is that it makes the pace of play from some of my other favorite card-based roguelike games, the likes of Monster Train and Slay the Spire, feel almost pedestrian by comparison.
Every time you level up in a run, you can pick from a selection of three or four cards to add to your deck. This is where resource management comes into play. You don't want to fill your deck with too many cards that require the same mana cost, as that'll lock you out of taking advantage of Combo Stack on each of your turns. Fortunately, the further you get into a run, the more the game starts to offer you higher-cost cards, so you can extend your combos even further and start wreaking the sort of havoc that makes Vampire Survivors so popular.
Speaking of resources, you can equip your cards with gems that you earn from finding treasure chests or clearing bosses. There are loads of different gems, including some that boost your stats, like the Candelabra or Duplicator cards, while others can double the damage or halve the mana cost of a card. It's a nice gameplay touch that makes every run feel different, even if you're using the same character, as you can combine cards and gems to aim for a specific build type.
After a few runs, you'll unlock Arcana cards, which are effectively the final pieces of the puzzle required to transform your runs from enjoyably chaotic into absolute bedlam. These cards aren't part of your deck; they're overarching, each with a different benefit.
There's one Arcana card in particular that serves as a perfect case study on Poncle's approach to balance as a developer. It's called Mana Syphon, and its effect is pretty simple; for every 100 cards you play, you gain a point of mana for the rest of the run. In the deeper dungeons, those with more than three floors, this Arcana pick feels wildly overpowered, which, in any other game, might spoil the experience, but that's what makes Poncle's games so much fun. It's not looking to engage that strategic, tactical part of your brain. It's more interested in the bit that wants to see things explode.
Vampire Crawlers is pretty similar to Survivors in that you'll end most runs with enough gold to pick up a new character or some upgrades from the in-game shops. While the turn-based gameplay itself doesn't feel like it's got much balance, you can feel it here, in the in-game economy. Even after a wildly successful run, you likely won't be able to pick up every upgrade in one fell swoop - except for in the endgame, where things can get a bit silly. You can usually grab just enough to make a difference in your next run, which you might need by the time you get to the later, more challenging levels, and no more than that.
In terms of how the game looks, I'm really impressed with how it owns the PS1-style 3D look while still staying true to the source material. Locations such as Gallo Tower and Inlaid Library are authentic to how I remember them from Survivors, but now they feel grander and even more gothic. Most of the character and enemy sprites are essentially the same, but that's an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation if I ever saw one. Poe is perfect just the way he is.
As for performance, I played the Nintendo Switch version on my Switch 2 with Handheld Boost Mode activated and had a fine time, for the most part. I say that as I experienced two crashes across around 30 hours of gametime. Yeah, that's not great, but, in the developer's defense, the game auto-saves at the start of every turn, so at least you won't lose any progress, and load times are pretty snappy too. For now, I'm happy to give Poncle the benefit of the doubt, but I'm hoping to see an early patch to address any crash-inducing bugs.
Frame rates are pretty consistent, too, but things can get a bit dicey in the late game of each run, especially if you're on the back of an ongoing combo with countless Runetracer missiles firing off in all corners of the screen. It's not ideal, but honestly, breaking the frame rate in Vampire Crawlers is kind of part of the fun, just like it was in Survivors. It's irrefutable proof that you've put together a completely busted build, so I don't mind losing a couple of frames per second for the sense of pride and satisfaction it delivers in this particular game.
The best compliment I can pay Vampire Crawlers is that even hours after clearing the credits, I just keep coming back for more. It has that secret sauce that makes me want to unlock everything, and it doesn't feel like an arduous grind for even one second. I just hope that, like with Vampire Survivors, Poncle keeps adding more content to this game to make it even more difficult to put down. Sure, I might never write my novel, learn how to play the piano, or see the world, but when I'm four floors deep in Gallo Tower with a combo chain in the double digits, I couldn't care less. If that's not the sign of a great game, I don't know what is.