Vampire Survivors was a bite-sized revelation when it arrived in 2022. It looked like someone had made it on their lunch break (I say this with love) and then proceeded to dominate lunch breaks for weeks and months to come. I’m not sure the video game industry knew what hit it. Elden Ring certainly didn’t know what hit it when Vampire Survivors surprise-won the Best Game BAFTA that year, and shout-out to Rock, Paper, Shotgun for being brave enough to declare Vampire Survivors its game of the year; I was so impressed I nearly turned coat. I love Vampire Survivors unashamedly, so I’ve been keeping an eye on follow-up Vampire Crawlers since it was announced.

Vampire Crawlers, we’re told, is the next game from Vampire Survivors developer Poncle. Except that’s not entirely true. The game has been made by someone else and presented by Poncle, presumably because it would generate more attention, and while that might sound disappointing, it improves when you learn that Arcade Paradise studio Nosebleed is the developer in question. Arcade Paradise, a game about running an arcade in the back of laundrette, was great. So it’s a different studio to give a different take on Vampire Survivors; a first-person retro-styled dungeon crawl powered by cards. Does it work? Yes, but.

Vampire Crawlers works within the confines of what it does, but as a Vampire Survivors experience, it wavers. This is mechanically quite a different game. It’s a card game. So whereas Vampire Survivors was fluid with battles unfolding in real-time, and levels flooding with enemies as you clung on for dear life, Vampire Crawlers is stop-start. You wander around, from battle to battle, to play turn-based games of cards.

There isn’t the same feeling of colossally unfavourable odds piling against you as hundreds of enemies swarm like darkness, threatening to snuff you out. Nor is there the experimental thrill of combining powers and discovering game-shaking evolutions as there was in Vampire Survivors. And I miss these things here. But a card game can’t work the same way, and given the constraints, it’s impressive how close Nosebleed has made this experience feel.

In Crawlers, you walk tile-by-tile around 3D spaces inspired by Vampire Survivors, such as the Forest or the Library, as you would move around an old dungeon crawler, hence the name. Enemies stand around and when you approach them, a battle begins. Cards appear, modelled on powers from Vampire Survivors, then you play them according to an energy pool. Defeat enemies to earn gems to level up, at which point you’ll be offered more cards (and sometimes other things). So: roam around, battle, and see how far you can get with one health-pool. That’s very basically how Vampire Crawlers goes.

What’s nice here are all the nods to the parent game. I don’t think we’ve ever seen these levels or maps from a first-person perspective, so there’s a dose of novelty in nosing around the wooden bookshelves of the Library and seeing enemies you’re familiar with face to face. That praying mantis, for example, is enormous. Levels also have nice detail dotted around them, like breakable candelabras and chests and other things familiar from the other game, which spew chickens or gold or power-ups when they’re opened or broken. There’s a between-runs town with buildings to explore as well, where you can spend gold to increase powers or buy heroes, as in Vampire Survivors. There’s homage everywhere, and as a fan that’s nice to be around.

Nosebleed has also done much to energise Vampire Crawlers’ card game and make it feel more real-time, even though it isn’t. You don’t have to wait for a card’s animation to play before playing another one, for example, so you can click cards and they’ll play the moment you do. This keeps the pace motoring. There’s an enjoyable combo idea, too, activated by playing cards of sequentially higher mana-cost one after another, so a one-cost card followed by a two-cost card followed by a three-cost card, for example. Do it and the value of the next card rises significantly, whether it’s a damage card or card-draw or a buff. Combos are incredibly useful, they’re vital later on, and there’s an underlying sense the game wants you to be powerful, which tallies brilliantly with Vampire Survivors. There’s no slow build-up here either, as powers are strong from the start.

But Vampire Crawlers doesn’t scale in the same way; card-powers can only be upgraded once rather than multiple times. Each card has a socket for an upgrade gem, which can do things like double damage, draw a card, return the card, add a buff and so on. Gems also evolve powers via a rare evolution gem, which means it isn’t a case of combining things and hoping for a great discovery. It feels a bit flat, a bit pre-prescribed. There doesn’t seem to be as much opportunity for experimentation, or breadth and depth in what’s offered, though it’s worth pointing out I’m only playing a demo, which doesn’t have all potential upgrades unlocked. It’s also worth stating that when you do have an upgraded deck, rammed with card-draw and complementary buffs, you can make some big plays that go some way towards touching the power-thrill of Vampire Survivors.

I’m a bit torn, then. I appreciate the attention to detail here and marvel at recreating a Vampire Survivors experience in a different genre, and there are moments – usually when fighting waves of creatures in a boss encounter – that Vampire Crawlers comes close to the intoxication of its source material. But the staccato nature of the game always seems to interrupt it. As a Vampire Survivors experience, it’s fractured, and as a card game, it’s not really detailed enough; I don’t see much room for strategy or theorising here. Small things like not being able to refuse card rewards (as far as I can tell) mean you can’t really trim and shape your deck the way you would in other deck-building games.

But again, this is only a demo. There’s development time left and more game to discover. As it stands, though, Vampire Crawlers feels trapped between two masters. It’s fun, but.