Vampire Crawlers Review: Vampire Survivors Goes Deckbuilding

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors opens with a strange kind of confidence. Poncle and co-developer Nosebleed Interactive have taken Vampire Survivors and turned it into a deckbuilding dungeon crawler that feels like a joke until you start playing it. The game is out now on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, and that matters because this is not a novelty side project. For players who liked the build-crafting chaos of Vampire Survivors, this spinoff offers a fresh format without losing the series’ core obsession with turning simple actions into a runaway power trip.

That’s why the surprise lands so hard. The reviewer calls it “What do you mean that developer Poncle successfully adapted its lightning-in-a-bottle Vampire Survivors into a deckbuilding dungeon crawler?” and that disbelief makes sense when you see how much of the original game survives the jump. Poncle’s approach “sees no distance between gimmick and quality,” and that’s the right read here. If you’ve been waiting for a roguelike that treats deckbuilding like a weaponized toybox, this one deserves your attention.

What Is Vampire Crawlers?

Poncle and Nosebleed Interactive frame Vampire Crawlers as an old-school PC dungeon crawler first and a card game second. You move through each floor in first-person, block by block, using directional keys while you hunt enemies, open treasure chests, collect experience points, and work toward a boss fight. That structure gives each run a clear rhythm, and it makes every room feel like a small tactical problem instead of a blur of menus. The perspective also puts the game’s 16-bit ghouls right in your face, which makes the visual style feel more immediate than the zoomed-out chaos of Vampire Survivors.

Most of Vampire Survivors’ structure carries over, just in a different form. You still select a stage to fight through, pick a specific character with a unique starting weapon, open chests that contain three upgrade options, buy permanent boosts with collected gold, and work through a massive list of achievements to unlock new toys. That’s a smart move, because it preserves the loop that made the original so sticky while changing how you interact with it. If you want a deckbuilder that respects Vampire Survivors’ obsession with momentum and unlocks, this is the one to watch.

Gameplay and Mechanics

Combat in Vampire Crawlers uses turn-based battles built around card versions of Vampire Survivors’ weapons. Each fight starts with a row of enemies in front of you, and your job is to spend limited mana playing as many cards as possible before the monsters can attack or build enough shield to blunt your damage. When you clear a row, the enemies behind them move forward, so the fight keeps pushing pressure toward you in a way that mirrors the wave defense feel of Vampire Survivors. As the reviewer puts it, “It’s a clever way to replicate the wave defense idea of Vampire Survivors in a turn-based card game.”

That battle system gets more interesting once you understand the card order rules. Cards gain more power if you play them in ascending order of cost, so zero-cost cards want to come first, then one-cost cards, and so on. Early on, that can feel restrictive, especially when you only draw a few cards and the correct play line looks obvious. Later, though, the system opens up because you start building hands that reward out-of-order play, and that’s where the game starts to feel genuinely clever instead of merely tidy.

The real hook is deck construction. Every time you level up by collecting familiar gems, you add a new card to your deck, and those cards can be augmented with modifiers you discover during runs, including 2x damage boosts. The reviewer describes one run where a dagger card granted a damage boost to every other attack played while it sat in hand, and another where a dagger let them draw an additional dagger from the deck. In another build, they stacked mana and card draw so heavily that they could sometimes play a dozen cards in one turn, which is exactly the sort of nonsense deckbuilders should encourage. “That’s the big-brain appeal,” and the game earns it by making each run feel like a puzzle you can break open with the right synergies.

• Cards can gain more power when played in ascending order of cost.
• Cards can be augmented with modifiers discovered during runs.
• Permanent boosts come from collected gold.
• Chests offer three upgrade options.
• Characters start with unique weapons.
• Achievements unlock new toys.

Visuals, Audio, and Performance

Vampire Crawlers keeps the series’ pixelated fury intact, but the first-person view changes how you read the action. Instead of scanning a wide battlefield, you watch weapons, knives, fireballs, and lightning blasts fill the screen from a close angle, and that makes the game feel more like a pressure cooker than a spectacle. The reviewer says the game can turn into a flood of objects that overwhelms the screen, and that’s clearly part of the appeal. It’s messy in the right way, because the chaos always serves the build you assembled.

Fast animations and responsive controls matter a lot here. Once a build comes together, you can execute a turn at lightning speed, activating half a dozen cards in a second and watching the results cascade almost instantly. The reviewer also singles out a skeleton who starts with bone cards that ricochet off enemies, then adds more bones to the hand to fire four or five cards in a flash. That kind of speed doesn’t just look good; it makes strong decks feel earned, because the game lets you move from planning to payoff without dragging its feet.

The game also pulls off an interesting visual comparison. It feels like a first-person Vampire Survivors mod, but the reviewer says it also channels Dungeon Master rather than the Castlevania roots that shaped Vampire Survivors. That matters because it gives Crawlers its own identity instead of making it look like a simple reskin. The result is a game that knows exactly how much old-school texture it needs before the modern card-game systems take over.

What Doesn't Work

Crawlers isn’t clean, and the reviewer doesn’t pretend otherwise. Character perks, which often revolve around playing a certain color of card, aren’t well explained or visualized, so you can end up guessing at systems the game should clearly teach better. Later stages can also run excessively long, sometimes lasting well over an hour, which turns a strong run into a patience test. Those are not small issues in a game built around repetition, because repetition only works when the player understands why they’re repeating it.

Gold grinding causes another problem. The reviewer says it can feel like you need to grind for gold to buy enough permanent upgrades to get through linear bridge levels, and those bridge levels create annoying progress choke points. That’s where Vampire Crawlers feels least elegant, because the game asks you to keep pushing while also slowing your progress with unclear perk logic and long stretches between meaningful breakthroughs. Still, the reviewer ends up forgiving a lot of that because the strategic core keeps paying off.

Vampire Crawlers works because Poncle understands the difference between a gimmick and a dead end. The game is inventive, absorbing, and strategically deep, even if some systems feel messy and some runs overstay their welcome. Its card battles turn Vampire Survivors’ familiar power fantasy into something more deliberate, while the first-person dungeon-crawler structure gives every floor a clear sense of place. If you want a roguelike deckbuilder that rewards planning without losing the series’ ridiculous energy, this is an easy recommendation, and the reviewer’s final note says it plainly: “I can’t stay mad at it for long.”