When Vampire Survivors first exploded onto the scene, it was pretty much all I could think about. The formula of jumping into runs, taking on thousands of enemies, and becoming absurdly overpowered kept me picking up the game again and again — Steam says I’ve played it for more than 60 hours. Over time, though, despite the game’s many updates and expansions, the formula got stale, and I haven’t played it in more than a year. But I’ve become obsessed with the Vampire Survivors universe once again thanks to the new spinoff Vampire Crawlers.
Vampire Crawlers — technically, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors — successfully translates the Vampire Survivors experience into a whole new style of game. This time, instead of a shoot ’em up crossed with a roguelike, it’s dungeon crawler mixed with a roguelike deckbuilder. You’ll still play as different characters, take on waves of enemies, and craft laughably strong builds, but instead of fighting bad guys in real time, you hunt them down by walking through retro-style dungeon crawler maps and dueling in turn-based deckbuilder card battles. The maps still have a charming pixelated style — many enemies look like blown-up versions of the enemy sprites from Survivors, which is really silly.
The key to the battles is playing cards in increasing order of mana cost. You’ll start each turn with a certain amount of mana, and at the top of each card, you’ll see how much each card costs to play. On their own, even high-cost weapon cards rarely make a dent against your opponents. But if you combo your cards in increasing cost order, they can scale to become ridiculously powerful.
It’s a relatively simple cycle. I’m usually just counting from zero to three over and over again. But it’s incredibly satisfying to make a build that lets you constantly cycle through combos for superpowered hits. You’ll also have to manage cards that can give you more mana, improve your stats, or add armor or healing, and they too can be boosted by combos to devastating effect. And like with Survivors, making strong evolution cards by combining the right weapons and items is basically required for victory.
There isn’t much to the dungeon crawling, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. While it’s novel to explore returning areas from Survivors that you only experienced in that game from a top-down view, in Crawlers you have a map that shows the layout of the entire floor, and you’ll quickly unlock items that reveal the enemies and points of interest. Having all that information is quite useful, though; it’s nice to be able to plan your route to enemies and treasure chests so that you’re set up well for the floor’s boss.
Also similar to Survivors, you’ll earn coins as you play, and after runs, you can spend those coins on upgrades for permanent progression. That includes new characters (which have different starting decks and abilities you can trigger during runs), stat improvements (like more health, attack power, or even the ability to bring additional characters into a crawl), and potentially game-breaking Arcana cards. Even if you don’t get a lot of coins in a run, you’ll probably still make progress on various achievements like using a certain weapon a specific amount of times, and those come with rewards, too.
More than 10 hours in, I’m feeling the same way about Crawlers that I initially did about Survivors; every moment that I can, I’m trying to sneak in a run. Given the similarities, I know this feeling might eventually go away. But for now, there’s no place I’d rather crawl.
Vampire Crawlers launches on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X / S on April 21st. It will launch on Android and iOS later in 2026.
