Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors

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. Its pull is less powerful with its dozen or so stages complete and behind me, but it’s clear that desire to return will never quite let up, lingering, waiting in the gothic wings for one more run.

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.

Vampire Crawlers is fun. Like, capital-F Fun. I’ve spent many hours with it and will spend more, especially if there’s as much long-term support as we saw with Survivors. But while Survivors felt like a totally fresh kind of experience in a lot of ways, Crawlers steps into territory that has a long and dense history, which means it’s fitting into a framework with plenty of comparison points available. And where Crawlers is weak, it’s weak in the very spot that defines the new space it’s walked into. That’s a bummer. 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.