Vampire Crawlers is perfect as long as you're still figuring out how to break it

Vampire Survivors initially seemed like a lightning in a bottle kind of game. It’s simple, it shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet I’ve spent hundreds of hours over multiple platforms trying to get all of the achievements. Turns out Survivors wasn’t a flash in the pan, and Luca Galante is just really good at making video games, because Vampire Crawlers not only hits the same heights as Survivors, it recaptures that same sense of wonder as you’re exploring all it has to offer.

If you’re familiar with the items and weapons in Survivors, almost all of Crawlers will look familiar to you. The difference is that Survivors is a fast-paced action game, and Crawlers is a turn-based deck builder. So while the King Bible may periodically summon a bunch of books to whirl around you in Vampire Survivors, the King Bible card in Vampire Crawlers summons a bunch of books to deal damage to a line of enemies. This conversion is pretty neat, as it both eases the learning curve from one game to the other while also acting as a fun kind of reward for your knowledge.

As for how Vampire Crawlers works, you’ll start in town and pick which Crawler you want to play as along with a few other upgrades depending on what you’ve unlocked. Then you’ll load into one of the game’s maps — each map has multiple stages, and each stage has a difficulty rating. Once you arrive, you’ll be able to move around a 3D map using the arrow keys – kinda like the Krypt in some of the more recent Mortal Kombat games – and bump into both upgrades and enemies in the environment.