Welcome back to Save State, where the greebles make you think something is a lot more complex than it is. Vampire Survivors caught the gaming sphere on fire, and its popularity is causing tons of bullet heaven style games to pop up all over Steam and other gaming platforms. Vampire Survivors is one of those titles where once you play it for a little bit, almost all of the difficulty dissolves into a celebratory skinner box that showers the player with coins and positive reinforcement. Poncle, the developers of Vampire Survivors, decided it was high time to take a stab at a different genre with Vampire Crawlers, which combines first person dungeon crawling levels with deckbuilding card battle systems.
Vampire Crawlers is one of those types of deck building games where almost all of its mechanics can be stretched to their limits to make players feel more powerful. Similar to Vampire Survivors, after a certain point, Crawlers will give ample opportunity for players to turn almost every deck they build or action they take to explode their enemies into delightful piles of gold coins while infinitely playing cards from their deck.
When you start Vampire Crawlers, you’re immediately thrust into a tutorial that explains some of the core mechanics of the game. Players are taught that you draw a number of cards per turn, are able to play as many cards as you have in hand that your mana allows, and that your mana regenerates each turn. At the end of the tutorial, you’re taught that playing cards in ascending order of mana costs enhances the effects of each additional card used, like increasing the amount of damage an attack card deals. The core mechanics are simple, easy to explain and understand, and it takes very little time for Vampire Crawlers to begin exposing players to cards, relics, and gems that will change how they interact with those core mechanics.
Moment to moment gameplay of Vampire Crawlers is simple: Your view is first person inside of whichever level you choose to play, and you move along the various passages finding treasure or enemies as you go. When you encounter an enemy, you immediately go into battle using your cards to fight, drawing a hand and slinging spells to dispatch the various foes that may be trying to accost you. Each floor of the stage has a boss you need to beat and after beating the final floor boss, a reaper shows up and kills you, telling you that you did a good job (that is until you kill him too). Your primary goal is to reach the end of each stage with as much money as possible to spend on various upgrades and unlocks, of which there are over 150 at the time of this writing.
Battles in Crawlers are simple but will take some strategizing early on while you get used to things. Enemies appear in waves on-screen, and you can avoid taking damage if you kill all of the enemies in the front line or stack up armor to prevent the damage that the enemies might deal on their turns. Effectively, you use whatever cards you’ve picked up in your run to spend the mana you get each turn as efficiently as possible, which will allow you to kill wave after wave of enemies to clear the battle. Each enemy killed earns you experience, and leveling up gives you a chance at more cards or powerful gems that can be socketed into your cards.
The gems are one major component on which the core deckbuilding strategy of Vampire Crawlers revolves. Evolving your weapons is similar to Vampire Survivors in that you need two specific cards, and choosing the Evolution Gem from a treasure chest or level up will make that attack card significantly more powerful and merges the two cards, shrinking the size of your deck. Other gems can do cool things like convert a card to a different color, turn a card into a wild that allows you to stack even higher combos, or allow you to deal damage based on how much gold you’ve got in your pockets. There’s a lot of variety in the cards and gems, and you’ll be unlocking 10 or more new cards, gems, and characters after clearing almost every new level you beat. The joy of progress is always nice.
In Vampire Crawlers, you pick your team of characters. After you first begin playing it, you really only have access to one character, though that does change relatively quickly as you unlock more relics and upgrades. Your starting character informs your starting stats, passive ability, and most of the cards for your starting deck, with each additional character conferring a card and their own passive. Some characters may generate mana when you cast a card of a particular color, increase how much money you gain, or, more importantly, will draw you cards when playing a card of a specific color. As always with deck building card games, drawing cards is king. I think one of the reasons I had such an easy time in Crawlers is that I unlocked a character who drew on playing a purple card early.
Cards are colored mostly by their function. Red cards will predominantly be attack cards, like the whip, knives, and spells that will be familiar to you if you’ve played Vampire Survivors. You can find yellow cards that almost universally have a support buff, like increasing the damage you deal when you play a weapon card, increasing your luck, or the ever-important Attractorb which draws you additional cards. Blue cards are defensive in nature, offering healing or armor to help you resist enemy attacks. Lastly, purple cards are ones that generate additional mana, which helps to break the mid-battle economy quite easily when combined with any sources of card draw.
You get powerful quickly in Vampire Crawlers, and in my case it really happened after playing for just a few hours as I had unlocked a character who drew on a purple card being played. Unlocking them helped me quickly to unlock more characters that either synergized with the one I had just unlocked, or led to me unlocking other, even more powerful characters who drew cards when playing the appropriate color. This led to me making my first “infinite” deck relatively early on because as mentioned previously, you will commonly find purple cards that yield more mana than what it takes to cast them. You’re only limited in how many cards you can play per turn by the amount of cards you draw and your mana pool, which led to me playing tons of cards every turn and generating over a hundred mana before even beating half the stages. It was super fun and made me feel incredibly powerful- and this wasn’t even getting to the point where I could have 100+ spell slinging combos with Wild Gem shenanigans either!
Of course, Crawlers does have a built-in anti-infinite system where each card can only be played four times in a turn. On the fifth cast in one turn, the card shatters and summons a purple reaper, but it also won’t take too long before you’re directly abusing that system to get rid of cards you don’t want in your deck and are farming the purple reapers for extra gold coins too. That being said, while it’s fun to play a game that lets the player feel smart and powerful, Vampire Crawlers doesn’t really demand a lot from its players, making this more of an ideal podcast or TV show in the background kind of video game, which seems to be Poncle’s modus operandi since Vampire Survivors was a lot of the same once you invested a few thousand gold eggs into a character too.
Almost everything you do in Crawlers is met with a kind of joyous celebration, an explosion of confetti and coins. The goal of Vampire Crawlers is to entertain players and not so much to challenge them, which means that players who are good at deckbuilders will reach astronomical levels of power early while the game maintains a nice, accessible floor for those who may find deckbuilding titles daunting. If someone reading this column found Chrono Ark (my personal favorite deckbuilding roguelite of all time) a little too challenging, Vampire Crawlers might be the absolute perfect starting point. For everyone else, it can be fun to dominate the various systems in Crawlers, but this won’t be a replacement of Slay the Spire or Monster Train for anyone with advanced knowledge of the genre.
With that said, I think I can bring this entry of Save State to a close. They always say life is a highway, but they don’t really explain how they’re going to ride it all night long. I thought I came prepared, but I’m not quite sure where to put the stirrups. See you in two weeks!
