Vampire Crawlers review: Another moreish success from Poncle

“Why?”. That’s all I thought when Vampire Crawlers was announced, a dungeon crawler set in the universe of Vampire Survivors. Forget the fast-paced auto-attacking roguelike nature that makes Vampire Survivors so moreish and wonderful. Instead, you’ll be making your way around an old-school dungeon, defeating enemies in card-based, turn-based battles. Boring, right?

If you’ve played a dungeon crawler before, you’ll have an idea of the basics you can expect here. As you move around a map, you’ll fight enemies, find items, and defeat a boss before moving on to the next level of the dungeon. By defeating enemies and gaining experience, you’ll level up, unlocking new cards to add to your hand. These will provide you with more powerful attacks, greater amounts of armour and more.

You’ll also earn coins as you move through a dungeon, which can be spent on permanent upgrades. Over time you can upgrade your starting health, how much you’ll heal after a fight, your default armour amount, and more. There’s also a range of character cards (known as ‘crawlers’) you can unlock, which will net you various bonuses lasting several rounds of a fight.

When it comes to combat, you’ll have a set number of energy which can be spent on cards. Many cards are free to play, so if you’re strategic, you can play multiple cards in one round, dealing massive damage to your enemies before they even get a look-in. Consider various bonuses, like gems you can attach to cards that make them duplicate when they play, cards that increase the size of your hand, and potential upgrades to the amount of energy you have, and there’s a possibility to play lots of cards in one go.

Of course, just like Vampire Survivors that came before it, Vampire Crawlers is largely based on luck, so how well you do will depend on what upgrades and bonuses you’re offered first. Get the right cards on your first few level-ups, and you’re set to go far. But struggle to get what you need and it could be a very swift game over. But there’s nothing lost: you can simply dust yourself off and try again. Each run will earn you money, which can be spent back in town on various upgrades. Progress on unlocking these is slow, but each one does make a noticeable difference, so over time you’ll be quite the formidable force.

What sets Vampire Crawlers apart from other games in the dungeon crawler space is its potential to get absolutely absurd when it comes to the amount of damage you can deal. Consider your upgrades carefully and think about the order that you play your cards in, and you can perform massive multipliers, scores that only get higher as you progress. It’s entirely possible to play without achieving that – at least in the early stages – simply by balancing attacks and armour and thinking carefully about the upgrades you pick up. But if there’s the potential to get messy, why on Earth would you not take it?

All things considered, Vampire Crawlers is an odd choice from Poncle. It’s Vampire Survivors in name and aesthetic only; a completely different genre makes for a totally different experience. And yet, Poncle (with the help of Nosebleed Interactive) has somehow managed to do it again: the developers have created a game that’s almost as addicting, the type of game that you simply do not want to put down. “Just one more go,” you’ll say, and before you know it, it’s 4 o’clock in the morning, you’re glued to your controller, and if you close your eyes all you can see are cards flying across your field of vision.