“Okay, just one more run.”
This is the phrase I’ve muttered at midnight–and then again at 2 AM–every day since diving into Vampire Crawlers. There are nights when it feels like it’d take an army to pull me from the clutches of its pixelated chaos. This deckbuilding spin-off to indie roguelike Vampire Survivors is every bit as gripping as that original outing, bringing both familiarity and freshness wrapped up into a first-person dungeon-crawling adventure.
I love that Vampire Crawlers maintains an undying commitment to the tone, characters, and retro visuals of its predecessor. It’s evident even from the initial cutscene, which shows a returning character fending off hordes of attackers in the Mad Forest from Survivors’ isometric view before transitioning to a first-person view of the area. Without using a single word, it proudly declares that a new perspective doesn’t change the fact that this is still unquestionably Vampire Survivors at its core.
That being said, where Vampire Survivors was about quick reactions, Vampire Crawlers is about planning and execution. Its slow, grid-based movement is merely a means to reach the next turn-based battle in which you now use a deck of cards to perform gloriously ludicrous attacks against hordes of enemies. Vampires’ items show up in the form of cards here, ranging from damage-based options like Knife, Whip, and Cross to support-focused options like the power-increasing Spinach or healing Pummarola. Evolutions even make their return, letting you combine two cards into a more powerful version that can further devastate your foes. New additions to the lineup are few and far between, but it’s this dedication to serving up what players already know and love that helps the transition into a new format feel seamless.
This time around, you don’t directly control specific characters so much as bring them along for the ride. Referred to as Crawlers, they each have unique starting weapons and passives, but they also present as cards that can be played from your deck to provide additional bonuses for a limited time, such as increased damage or XP boosts. Eventually, you can bring along up to three Crawlers at a time, so mixing and matching characters that complement each other helps you set the tone of your runs right out of the gate.
Choosing these Crawlers is a fun way to customize your loadout before ever visiting a dungeon, but it’s also important since card acquisition is otherwise largely random. While you can banish, skip, or reroll cards a limited number of times once you’ve invested in some upgrades, luck still plays some part in the direction your deck takes during a run. Still, Vampire Crawlers is rarely too punishing with this, as it’s more about knowing how to play the cards you’ve been dealt than it is about min-maxing your deck. Building a specialty deck no doubt improves your chances of victory, but I was surprised at how many times I managed to squeak by with a mismatched hand due to deft use of the game’s combo system.
Each card requires a specific number of mana points to play, with most falling between zero and three, and playing them in numerical order creates a combo that powers up subsequent cards. This means you’ll deal a lot more damage if you combo into an attack card, which is great for clearing away enemies–but it’s leveraging this mechanic to improve buffs or stats that really make a run come together. It’s very satisfying to use combos to power up a card that improves your max health over and over until you become a nigh-unkillable tank.
New cards are granted by leveling up or discovering unique loot spots throughout the game’s multi-level dungeons. At least early on, it’s vital to plan for how you want to tackle a level’s enemy layouts to most easily reach potential loot opportunities. Choosing to take on a sub-boss before clearing other enemies on the floor may see you suffer from an underdeveloped deck, which could leave you with too little health to reasonably survive the run. Conversely, managing to eke out a win against these tougher villains could earn you exactly what you need to pummel every other group of monsters on the level. This risk-reward approach is what keeps early runs feeling enjoyably stressful.
That being said, a focus on strategic navigation peaks during the first half of Vampire Crawlers. Despite their random layouts, it doesn’t take long to figure out the flow of dungeons and how to maximize your efficiency. Moreover, as with Vampire Survivors before it, you eventually progress far enough in stat upgrades and unlockables that you can start being bolder in your approach. Many enemies that once made you tremble become trivial, so older dungeons, should you revisit them, begin to feel like little more than laid-back coin farming spots–unless you toggle your upgrades off in the village, at least.
Even so, the game ensures your power creep doesn’t get too out of control until you near the end of the campaign by locking certain major mechanics behind Relics found in later stages. While most of the core stat upgrades are pulled from the previous game and work the same–offering incremental increases to things like damage, total health, and base mana amount–Relics impact the complexity of the gameplay in more dramatic ways. There are over a dozen of these game-altering items to discover during the journey, and they frequently introduce entirely new features that change the way you approach exploration and building decks.
For instance, slotting gems into certain cards to get a variety of passive and active boosts can make or break a run. So, when you discover a Relic that adds a jeweller where you can increase or decrease the spawn rate of specific gems, the excitement of choosing between so many begins to give way to the realization that there’s an advantage to limiting your options. When only the strongest (see: borderline game-breaking) gems are spawning, you can ensure you’re virtually always reaching peak performance.
It’s in that realization that Vampire Crawlers begins to reveal its true end goal: making you smile as you dispense pure carnage. In this way, it comes full circle back to Vampire Survivors, where you could leave your character idle and go eat dinner while it auto-farmed for a few hours. Here, once you’ve become a proficient deckbuilder, you can create an unstoppable stack of cards that lets you plow through dungeons while spamming the auto-play button to unleash anarchy without much thought. It’s a sublime payoff for the 15-20 hours it takes to earn the necessary components to make it happen, and seeing just how far you can push things can feel like a whole game to master unto itself.
As a result, even with everything unlocked and nothing left to work toward, Vampire Crawlers still has its teeth in me, begging me to dive back in and decimate all who stand before me. Since I haven’t come close to growing tired of mowing down baddies with the wackiest decks possible, I guess I’ll give it just one more run.
And then maybe just one more after that.
Source: https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/vampire-crawlers-review-pixel-perfect-pandemonium/1900-6418483/
