Vampire Crawlers review

Vampire Crawlers is a brave attempt to turn everyone’s favourite bullet heaven monster masher into a deckbuilder. An attempt that keeps threatening to actually work. There’s good ideas in here, but too often it’s about as fun as literally crawling through an actual dungeon.

Vampire Survivors, for the two of you who are uninitiated, is the popcorn chicken of 2D action games. You wander around a map auto-attacking while monsters bombard you from all sides. Every few seconds you level-up, pick between two death-dealing toys, and then you’re straight back into the action.

Vampire Crawlers attempts to squash that formula into a deckbuilder that’s entirely turn-based. The opening sees you approach a swarm of killer bats. You draw a hand of three cards, play one of the attacks, and watch the bats die instantly.

Blue XP gems pour out of their corpses and send your levelling up bar flying up until ding! You’ve just ‘earned’ your first level up reward. The same dopamine hit that made Vampire Survivors such a breakout smash seems to have translated over to this spin-off intact.

This tutorial also introduces the combo mechanic. Every card has a mana cost and you’ve got three mana to spend each turn. Whenever you play a card, the next number higher gets a boost if you play it immediately after. So if I play a whip card that costs zero mana, suddenly my fire wand that costs one mana hits much harder.

So comboing is a winning strategy. The problem is, for far too long, it’s the only logical strategy. Say I draw three cards and they cost one, two, and three mana respectively. Why would I possibly play them in any order but 1-2-3? There’s no punishment for doing so, nor any potentially superior reward for trying something else.

0-1-2, end turn. 1-2-3, end turn. Oooh, should I play 1-2-2 or 2-1-2? That’s the only ‘decision’ I’ve seen in ages and it literally doesn’t matter. The game was trapped in this dull loop for hours. I’d recommend buying the upgrade that expands your hand by up to two cards as quickly as possible, just to give yourself something to do. Even then it’s often all too obvious what the ‘correct’ hand is to play.

There’s more strategy in choosing what cards you add to your deck. Then which gems you slot into them, and—much later—which cards you add more slots to. This eventually becomes pretty compelling, but it’s not enough early on, because too much of the game’s first half is a pushover for any of this to feel truly necessary.

Difficulty is a mess. After a few upgrades or generous card drops, standard enemies become no threat whatsoever. That dopamine rush of experience gems quickly suffers from diminishing returns when I don’t feel like I’ve earned them. And since standard enemies aren’t putting up a fight, it’s hard to know what rewards to choose. More armor-giving cards? A "spicy damage" buff? What even is spicy damage? I’m guessing some sort of status effect, but everything's dying too fast for me to find out. Then when you do face a boss with actual teeth, you’re completely unprepared for it.

Later levels introduce more challenging cannon fodder, naturally, but sooner or later you’re going to hit a brick wall that no amount of skill will surpass. You simply haven’t bought enough increasingly expensive permanent upgrades from the village hub, like health restoration, extra mana, and bonus XP.

Money monster

Upgrades cynically gating your progress was true of Vampire Survivors, too, but that mattered less because replaying earlier levels was fun and still required skill. Crawlers is too rigid and willing to play itself to make replaying levels feel like anything but a chore. A successful run usually takes me around forty minutes. That’s a pretty large chunk of time to spend mostly bored.

I experimented for ages in the village hub trying to find a more satisfying combination of settings. I bought upgrades that make enemies hit harder but also drop more experience. I tried different heroes who all bring slight variations to the table. Fair play, there’s tons of options here, and some of the prizes get impressively granular. You can even manipulate the rarity of certain drops, if you’ve gained enough gold to pay the staggering costs to do so.

Perhaps you’ll chance upon the magic combination that turns this game into a perfectly-balanced masterpiece and then celebrate by screaming at me in the comments section. But is it really too much to ask for a game to craft a coherent difficulty curve for itself?

Each floor of a dungeon has a mini-map that tells you everything. The location of the floor’s boss, treasure chests, stuff that can be smashed for money, and all the standard enemies. There’s no incentive for any approach deviating from ‘collect all the prizes, clear out the standard enemies, then do the boss’. This feels more like admin than exploring a deadly dungeon. At one point a surprise boss ambush popped up, but that was literally the one break from the routine I saw in the eighteen hours it took me to see the credits.

Eventually, I unlocked enough interesting upgrades and reached deadly enough areas to see Vampire Crawlers at its best. I was drawing larger hands that offered more of a choice of combos and could play multiple heroes at once. It finally felt like I could really explore interesting synergies and make tactical decisions.

But this didn’t start happening until I was eleven hours in, and it honestly felt much longer. Besides which, the more permanent upgrades you have, the more frequently you're able to simply break the game, discovering a deck that turns the rest of a run into a dull pushover with no further surprises. Monster Train 2 had a similar taste for throwing OTT powers at the player, but also knew how to craft a terrific challenge for you to face them with.

It’s no small feat that the developer has managed to make a turn-based deckbuilder that feels like playing Vampire Survivors. Sadly it's also shown how crucial elements like being able to flee a failing fight or nailing the timing of an auto-attack apparently are to that game’s winning formula. There’s just too many better deckbuilders out there for me to recommend this interesting but deeply flawed genre mash-up.