Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
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Critics Recommend
Critic Reviews for Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors
There are moments of fun, especially towards the end, but too often I just wanted to ram a garlic-flavoured stake through Vampire Crawlers repetitive, grindy heart.
All in all, Vampire Crawlers is a tremendous achievement. Everything here works almost flawlessly, with a gameplay loop that is quick, sharp, and smart. Genre transitions within the same game series rarely work so wonderfully, but Luca Galante and Poncle have created an incredible experience that will make you crave more, even if it overstays its welcome a tad for completionists.
It's in that realization that Vampire Crawlers begins to reveal its true end goal: making you smile as you dispense pure carnage.
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.
The gameplay loop is fun and addictive, rewarding experimentation and offering countless opportunities for different builds. Exploring dungeons has never been more fun, and I'm far more eager to see more Vampire Crawlers content than a sequel to Vampire Survivors.
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.
An impressively successful follow-up to Vampire Survivors, that features entirely different gameplay but a similarly deceptive sense of depth and nuance to its charmingly low-tech action.
But even for now, on day one, it’s 100 percent worth every cent…especially if you put a bunch of time into the demo like I did, since the game carries over all of that progress. Seriously. I launched Vampire Crawlers and had 46 Steam achievements at the ready.
