Vampire Crawlers finds the perfect balance between strategy and automation, and it gives me that Survivors feeling all over again

It’s impossible to talk about Vampire Crawlers without referencing Vampire Survivors, so let’s get it over with. The optimal way (and I won’t hear otherwise) of playing Vampire Survivors is to get so powerful that the game plays itself. I want to put the work in, so I don’t have to work at all. After playing Vampire Crawlers for around 20 hours, I can tell you that it’s the same thing here.

You generally find that the standard card-wielding strategy game is a bit of a thinker. Slay the Spire, for instance, doesn’t only ask you to perfect your deck of attacks, skills, and powers; it also tasks you with using them effectively and devastatingly in combat. You can lose a run of Slay even with the perfect deck, but I’m not so sure that’s true with Vampire Crawlers.

This isn’t a bad thing. Reaching a flow state in any game is a boon, but the nitty-gritty of a deck-building card game usually means I have to concentrate literally all of the time. It’s about finding synergies, then setting up a game state where those can pay off. I love it, but it can be exhausting.

Vampire Crawlers performs much like any game of its type: you collect cards, you use those cards in any order you like (provided you have the mana to do so) to defeat enemies. The difference between this game and many others like it is that there isn’t a lot to think about during a fight, and it’s great.

The main way Vampire Survivors handles synergies and the like is via its combo system. Playing cards that cost one more mana than the previous one will add a multiplier to my combo. As long as I can count, I can do damage. The rest of the work happens in the choices I make; it’s in which cards I add and how I modify them, all in an attempt to stagger my mana costs and destroy the enemy.

The meat and potatoes of Vampire Crawlers’ fights are waves and waves of enemies; minions that, if I play cards in sequential order, don’t last more than a few seconds. Fights are frantic and violent, and are often over almost before they begin. It’s the same power fantasy as I get while playing Vampire Survivors, and it’s wild to me that these two games feel so similar despite being structurally so different.

To test the potential of automation, I went into a boss fight on a particularly grueling run and decided to hit the Play All button on my screen. This allows the game to choose which cards get played, and it worked. I was healing and dealing damage in equal measure, and because of the cards I had crafted along the way, it felt like there was no chance of failure. I don’t lean on this Play All button at all, really, but it’s satisfying to know that if I manage to build a suitably powerful deck of cards, I can pretty much let the game play itself, as it should be.

It’s Steam Deckbuilders Fest at the moment, which isn’t as niche as I probably thought it would be a few years ago, so if any of this sounds interesting, and you want to give Vampire Crawlers a go, now is the best time to do it – it gets a huge recommendation from me.