18,302 concurrent players. 99% positive reviews. #2 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart, one day after launch. poncle didn’t just expand the Vampire Survivors universe — it detonated it and rebuilt it as a card game.

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors launched April 21 and immediately started dominating charts. The spinoff trades Vampire Survivors’ hypnotic auto-shooter chaos for turn-based, first-person dungeon crawling with a deckbuilder’s strategic depth. Against most expectations for genre-shifted spinoffs — historically smaller, lazier affairs — it’s working.

Same DNA, Different Skeleton

The original Vampire Survivors was a solo project built on a £1,100 budget that accidentally invented the bullet heaven genre. Vampire Crawlers is a traditional production, co-developed with Nosebleed Interactive, and the difference shows. The game is substantially more feature-rich at launch than its progenitor ever was, sporting a first-person dungeon crawling perspective inspired by classic RPGs like Wizardry and Might & Magic.

But the core loop is unmistakably Survivors. Pick a character — now called a Crawler — fight through floors of enemies, earn experience, level up to add cards to your deck, and try to build something that handles escalating hordes. The items, enemies, zones, and stats are all lifted from the original. Daggers, holy water, garlic, the Mad Forest — all present, but completely recontextualized into a turn-based combat system where every decision costs mana.

The Turboturn™

The mechanical hook is what poncle calls the Turboturn: play cards in ascending order of mana cost and each successive card gets a multiplier boost. A zero-cost dagger leads into a one-cost fire wand, which sets up a two-cost finisher that hits dramatically harder than it would alone. Simple on paper, increasingly complex as your deck bloats across a run.

Xbox Wire described it as giving you “that macro satisfaction of making an effective build” from Vampire Survivors, “but also the turn-by-turn pleasure of executing it.” Animations stack as you play cards, so once your engine is humming, you can blitz through hands at the same breakneck pace the original was known for.

Two Very Different Reviews

Steam players are ecstatic. With 745 positive reviews against just 10 negative, Vampire Crawlers sits at Overwhelmingly Positive. But context matters — the top reviews come from players with around an hour or less of playtime. The enthusiasm runs hot: “Vampire Survivors made a banger of a sequel,” reads one. “Best game I’ve ever played,” reads another, clocking in at 60 minutes. This is day-one energy, the kind that can shift fast once the honeymoon phase breaks against a difficulty wall.

Professional critics are split. PC Gamer’s review landed at 50%, saying the game was “trapped in this dull loop for hours” — roughly eleven before the strategic depth kicks in. The core complaint: for too long, the optimal play is simply sorting cards by cost and playing them in order. “0-1-2, end turn. 1-2-3, end turn,” the reviewer wrote. “That’s the only ‘decision’ I’ve seen in ages and it literally doesn’t matter.” Difficulty is described as a mess — standard enemies crumble, then bosses obliterate you, with progress gated behind increasingly expensive permanent upgrades.

The MSN syndicated review was far more positive, praising the Wizardry-inspired dungeon crawling and calling the result “just addictive and satisfying as the original game for different reasons.” Both critics agreed the late game sings. The disagreement is whether getting there is worth the slog.

The Mysterious Bundle at #3

The Empire’s Second Act

The real story here isn’t the chart position. It’s the proof of concept. Vampire Survivors was a £1,100 solo project that snowballed into a genre-defining hit. Vampire Crawlers is a calculated expansion — different genre, bigger team, twice the price tag ($9.99 vs Vampire Survivors’ $4.99). poncle explicitly addressed the pricing in its FAQ, noting that the game was “made from scratch” by two full teams, making it “a more traditional and much more costly production.”

It’s available now on Steam, Xbox, Switch, PlayStation, and Game Pass, with mobile versions planned for later in 2026. The bullet heaven empire just added a second pillar. The question now is whether that 99% holds steady once players push past hour two and hit the grind that PC Gamer’s reviewer says nearly broke them.

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