Vampire Crawlers recently showcased its ‘Turbo Wildcard Dungeon Explorer’ twist at London Games Festival and I managed to get my hands on it to see what’s in store for this new spin on the trend setting monolith.
Vampire Crawlers takes the all too familiar assets and style of Vampire Survivors and inserts them into an explorative dungeon crawler, featuring all the same items, characters and enemies that we’ve grown to love in, but using them in a whole new way to deliver an equally addictive and fun experience.
You’re placed into a dungeon that’s themed on one of the various locations and levels of Vampire survivors, but this time it lets you explore with a first person perspective and duke it out against the dungeon residents with both cards and abilities that you’ve either started with or gathered along the way.
Throughout Vampire Crawlers you power up, get new weapons and explore the areas as you try to fight your way on to reach the end. Combinations are still just as crucial as before, with a wide array of power ups and weapons at your finger tips but arguably this is a much faster paced experience while focusing the combat on smaller groups of enemies.
Although the game is still fast paced you aren’t actually met with a timer (at least not in the demo version here) as Vampire Crawlers gives you a chance to think about your actions a bit more methodically and allow for tighter use of your individual weapons rather than letting them all just fly out like before.
With so many combinations for items and upgrades, who knows whether your run will let you fly through to the end or scrape by with bad luck but my favourite feature the chest with all of it’s crazy looting animations are back and still hits you hard when you see the flashing lights and multiple rewards when opening one.
Vampire Crawlers currently has a demo available as well as its full release coming on the 21st of April. It’ll launch for Xbox Series, PS5, Nintendo Switch, PC & Mac. Mobile versions are planned, but don’t currently have a release date.
