The weapons still do the work, but now you have to think first

For a series that mostly asked you to walk around and let your weapons get on with it, Poncle’s latest wants a surprising amount of thinking out of you. Not that I’m complaining, but it just takes some getting used to.

Vampire Crawlers is out now on iOS and Android, having landed roughly six months after it hit PC and consoles back in April. It was first shown off last year, and it swaps the top-down chaos of Vampire Survivors for a first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler with a deck of cards doing the fighting.

Those cards are mostly familiar weapons, and they play out in sequence. So, the order you lay them down decides which combos go off and when. You move along set paths through catacombs, mechanical dungeons and crumbling ruins, running into the usual Survivors cast on either side. 

Gems can be slotted into cards for upgrades, and certain pairings unlock Fusions, which should ring a bell if you’ve ever evolved a weapon in the original. Then there’s Turboturn, which lets you skip the activation animations and stack actions on top of each other mid-battle. That’s the part I’d be in for.

The mobile launch of Vampire Crawlers also lines up with the free Death Parade update. That brings two new Crawlers to pick at the start of a run, Big Troubler and Sir Ambrojoe, along with four new Arcanas, four new cards and a Moongolow Challenge Stage.

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