Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors Reviews

You can't say you've gotten a good build until Playing your best card has you turning your volume and brightness down. Lest you blind and deafen yourself with all the particle effects.

Extremely fun game. I got 100% achievements in about 20 hours and I enjoyed every single one (As of this review, there is no current DLC out). 1000% recommend, it's only $10 and even with 100% achievements there is still more to do. Perfect for steam deck.

ty Vampire survivors for making a 3d doom like rpg scroller the old gang is back with cards mana and combos same levels just 3d turn baes game play lots to do and unlock

Vampire Crawlers is a fun spin-off game based on Vampire Survivors. I really like the deckbuilding and the combinations you can make. You can go infinite pretty easily, just watch out that your cards don't break. In terms of content, it took me around 30 hours to unlock and upgrade everything. I hope they will give it a lot of updates like Vampire Survivors and increase the difficulty more. The game works great on the steam deck!

The game has a certain pull at the start, but it quickly loses that momentum. The enemies are repetitive, you have to like the pixel art style, and ultimately, it just becomes boring. Did I have fun? A little. Would I buy the game again? No.

It's alright. To be clear I don't think it's a bad game. My gripe with it is that the gameplay loop just gets really repetitive really fast and it doesn't really have that much depth. You unlock a bunch of different characters and they sort of play differently, but playing it out never feels unique or different. It's the same thing with the locations you unlock to crawl through. There are different monsters in these areas, different themes (Library, Bridge, Forest..) but ultimately it just felt same same to me. I enjoyed it for a few days and then just completely lost interest. If none of that bothers you too much though and you like deck builders, probably worth a shot. Games dirt cheap after all.

I dont like it. I feel like I should like it because I love Roguelike Deckbuilders and I love Vampire Survivor, but I'm finding I love them for very different reasons and those reasons don't mix. Its not the mindless fun of a good bullet heaven, and its not the crazy depth and strategy of a good roguelike deckbuilder. It always just feels a little more tedious than I like pathing through mazes and it never hits the scale of destruction you can get from a good bullet heaven where youre clearing thousands of enemies a minute.

A good sequal to vampire survivors. they changed the formula from arcaded style bullet hell to early fake 3d dungon crawl. battle system is solid and gived you more time to appreciate the great pixel art. if the the creator continues this game series i can not wait to see where the next game goes.

Vampire Crawlers never reaches the dopamine hit of bullet heavens/survivors-likes. If you've played the demo you've simultaneously already seen everything and experienced the peak of the game's difficulty. It rapidly devolves into following the same patterns and combo lines every single time. Weapons stop mattering, choices stop mattering, enemies don't matter. Damage doesn't matter, because it's not like anything can hit you. Nothing matters. You just infinite combo out every encounter with your starting deck. And the combo protection certainly doesn't matter either. I'm all for mindless fun. This is somehow less than mindless.

There is a part of your brain that does not care about challenge. It does not want to overcome anything. It wants to watch numbers get bigger, feel the dopamine hit of a chain reaction going off, and experience the specific satisfaction of becoming so powerful that the game barely constitutes an obstacle anymore. Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors knows exactly where that part of your brain lives, and it spends its entire runtime tickling it. This is not a criticism. It is the whole point. poncle's follow-up to Vampire Survivors, co-developed with Nosebleed Interactive, takes a sharp genre pivot on paper: out goes the chaotic auto-attacking top-down swarm game, in comes a first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler built on deckbuilding mechanics. But where a lesser studio might have lost the thread of what made the original work, Vampire Crawlers understands something fundamental about its predecessor's appeal. Vampire Survivors was never really about survival. It was a power fantasy dressed up as a bullet hell. Vampire Crawlers is the same power fantasy wearing a different costume, and it fits just as well. The Combo Loop The core mechanic is elegant in its simplicity and deceptively explosive in practice. You explore grid-based dungeons, encounter enemies, and fight them using a hand of cards. Each card has a mana cost, and here is the key: if you play cards in ascending mana order, each card in the sequence multiplies the effect of the next. A chain of four or five well-ordered cards can turn a modest attack into something that wipes an entire room. Early on, this feels like a genuinely interesting puzzle. You are managing mana, thinking about sequencing, considering which cards to keep and which to discard. There is real tactical texture in those first few stages. Then you find the Wild Cards. Wild Cards reset your mana counter mid-combo. Pair them with cards that generate additional mana, and suddenly your turn does not have to end. You draw more cards, reset the counter again, draw more, reset again, loop until everything on screen is dead. The game does attempt to push back on this: leave your turn open too long and increasingly dangerous enemies begin spawning in. But the counter-play is straightforward enough that once you have internalized it, the threat barely registers. You simply end your turn before the spawns become overwhelming, then obliterate everything on the following turn from a position of total dominance. This mechanical ceiling arrives roughly when you cross the first bridge in the game's progression. It is not a long journey to get there, and it is a one-way door. The strategic puzzle phase does not last, and the game never really brings it back. If that sounds like a problem, you are probably not the target audience. If that sounds like a relief, welcome home. The closest comparison is not Slay the Spire. It is not Balatro in its default state either, though a lucky Balatro run where everything clicks and multipliers stack beyond reason comes close. What Vampire Crawlers delivers is that lucky-Balatro-run feeling on demand, reliably, by the late stages of almost every run. The house is always going to let you win eventually, and it has designed the table specifically to make that winning feel spectacular. The sound design and visual feedback deserve real credit here. Combo chains are accompanied by escalating audio and screen effects that make the whole thing feel genuinely satisfying even when you know, intellectually, that you have solved the puzzle and are just executing. There is something almost hypnotic about watching a well-built deck go to work. A full playthrough runs roughly 24 hours, and that time passes without friction. Once the core gameplay loop stops offering meaningful challenge, Vampire Crawlers does what Vampire Survivors did before it: it turns the game into an achievement hunt. Unlockables drip out at a pace that ensures nearly every run yields something new, whether that is a card, a Crawler character with a distinct starting deck, or a modifier that reshapes future runs. The progression loop is generous to a fault, calibrated so that even a rough run moves the needle somewhere. Each Crawler character functions as a different entry point into the deck-building system. Some lean into raw damage, others into shields and survivability, others into resource generation. Trying a new Crawler genuinely changes how a run feels in its early stages, even if all roads eventually lead to the same infinite combo paradise. The game also implicitly invites self-imposed restrictions for players who want to find the edge again. No Wild Cards. Commit to a single Crawler's native cards only. Build around the weakest weapon evolutions and see how far you can push them. None of this is formalized, but it is there for players who want it. Whether that counts as replayability or creative problem-solving on the player's part is a reasonable question, but the option exists. The main legitimate criticism is pacing. Battles you know you have already won still take several minutes to resolve. The animations and audio that make the combo system feel satisfying in the first ten hours become the thing standing between you and your next unlock in hour twenty. The game does include a speed-up function for people who want it, though it is easy to ignore entirely and the experience does not suffer much for playing at normal pace. Where this becomes a real issue is the achievement grind. If you are a completionist chasing those last 30 Steam achievements, you are looking at a substantial time investment playing through scenarios you have already mastered, at a pace the game controls. For a $9.99 game, that is a fair trade for most people. For the players who need 100% completion, it may test patience. Vampire Crawlers is not trying to be the next Slay the Spire. It is not interested in being a deep tactical puzzle that demands mastery and punishes complacency. It knows exactly what it is: a lizard brain power fantasy built from familiar parts, engineered to make you feel invincible, priced so that the 24 hours it offers feels like an embarrassingly good deal. Whether that is enough depends entirely on what you are looking for. If you go in expecting to be challenged, you will be disappointed by the time you hit the mid-game. If you go in expecting the same escalating power trip that made Vampire Survivors so compulsively playable, you will find it delivered with genuine craft and a knowing wink. It is a game that was built to glitch in your favor. That was always the plan. 8.5 / 10