Vampire Survivors' New Spin-Off Has Me Hooked, and Combolands Might Get You Too

May 2, 2026 - 07:16

I think I really liked 2022 indie breakout Vampire Survivors. But I have long wondered if the game just made me think I liked it. Playing it felt great. Maybe too great?

In Vampire Survivors, you are a hero warrior guy or a magician lady or maybe even an old man with some repellent garlic. From a top-down perspective, you see your hero swarmed by skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but no vampires, of course). You cannot manually attack your foes. The attacking is automatic, and you just move. As enemies are killed for you, they drop blue gems. Collecting them fills a bar. Filling the bar unlocks a selection of upgrades. Those upgrades can make your attacks more powerful or more frequent. Maybe they give you a second attack, perhaps some spinning books to supplement your whip or your lightning.

If you have played it, you know how smoothly Vampire Survivors draws you in and how tightly it keeps you from doing anything but play it. It chirps with slot-machine sounds. It fires off virtual fireworks as you crack open a treasure chest. That progress bar keeps filling up, and the rewards keep on coming. Where once you were weak, soon you are strong.

Did I like Vampire Survivors? Or did I just like how much it felt like a constant celebration of mindless, near-endless winning?

The one thing I was sure was genuinely good about the game was that my kids, my wife and I could easily play it together. That was indisputably wonderful.

My too-many hours enraptured by Vampire Survivors led me to approach its first big spin-off, April's Vampire Crawlers, with great caution.

Crawlers is played solo in a first-person perspective, one turn at a time, as your warrior man or magician lady dungeon-crawls through forests, bridges, libraries. I presume there eventually is an actual dungeon but I have not spoiled myself. Each region is filled with enemies and the occasional treasure chest.

As I dove in, I heard the familiar slot machine sound effects and saw a progress bar that kept filling up as I killed skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but, so far, no vampires).

Here we go again, I thought. Another seductively mindless game that I better be ready to tear myself from. Actually, I was wrong about the mindlessness.

I knew that combat in Vampire Crawlers is not automatic. Each attack or item is represented as a card, and battles are a matter of randomly drawing cards from a tiny deck into your hand, then playing them, registering their effects on the enemies, discarding them, earning more cards for your deck, shuffling and playing through it again. With each hand, you can choose which cards to play or play all of them in a single button press. I mistakenly thought the latter was the preferred action. After all, Vampire Survivors did not even want me to press a button to attack. Surely the gameplay joke of Crawlers is that I should just play all of the cards in my hand at once?

Incorrect.

I was initially playing Crawlers by spamming the all-cards-at-once option and the action was feeling as mindless as Survivors. But, as would be obvious with any other card-based game, Vampire Crawlers players are best served by choosing the right card to play each time. The key to the combat system involves card combos. The game's attack cards, hero cards and item cards cost different amounts of magical mana points to play. The potency of those cards increases if you play cards in the order of their mana cost. For example, you would ideally first play a card that costs zero mana, then a card that costs one, then a two card, to keep the combo going. If you are clever, you will work in wild cards, maybe turn a card's value negative. Perhaps there are other tricks I have yet to discover to keep the combo going.

Once this combo system clicked, I realized that the gameplay in Vampire Crawlers is meant to be thoughtful, not mindless. When playing, I need to think about how I am building my deck to increase the chance that my randomly drawn hand will contain cards I can combo consecutively. As I have been playing, I have needed to think about which new cards to grab, which ones to trash, all to build the most potent deck. I need to be strategic. If Vampire Survivors was a slot machine, maybe this is at least poker or craps.

As with Vampire Survivors, Crawlers is proving hard to quit. This time, I do not feel as guilty when the minutes (or hours) stack up.

Bonus Game Recommendation: Combolands