With a litany of secrets and endless combinations of weapons and powers, Vampire Survivors was the sort of game where you’d always need a guide nearby. Now that the spin-off Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors has launched, players will be uncovering the key strategies as one collective.
For that reason, I’ve put together this list of tips I came up with during my time reviewing Vampire Crawlers. While this list will only scratch the surface on what’s on offer, it should be enough to get you started on developing your own tactics throughout the journey.
Given the sense of discovery in Vampire Crawlers is half the fun, I’ve tried to limit my spoilers for tips, mechanics and unlockables to the opening half of the campaign.
Experiment With Your Crawlers
Crawlers are a character card, adorned with familiar playable avatars from Vampire Survivors. You start with one, and as you accumulate more gold, you can unlock second and third slots to build out an entire party of Crawlers.
The Crawlers in your party dictate your starting load-out. The leader adds multiple cards to your opening deck. Your second and third Crawlers will add one more card each. When you play a teal Crawler card, it will activate one or multiple effects that may last for a set duration or the remainder of your run.
This is all very vital to know. The combinations of Crawlers with which you venture out have a massive impact on your overall strategy. My build was largely based around developing a high Amount stat and trying to do devastating damage with low-cost projectile attacks as a result. Therefore, as I levelled up, I made sure to choose cards that followed this line of thinking.
Experiment with different combinations of Crawlers often. Even if it doesn’t seem obvious on the surface, the different characters you bring into your journey will quickly their influence on your build.
Build Around Your Arcanas
Arcanas are a modifier card that you select before a run once you unlock the Fortune Teller in the Village. These have major gameplay implications, so it’s important to choose wisely.
The arcana I often used was the Your Shield My Liege card, which retains your armor count between turns. This was a monumental game-changer. It meant that I no longer needed to flood my deck with so many armor cards to always account for the possibility of a highly damaging attack.
Pick an arcana that works best for your gameplay style and make sure that you always choose Crawlers and cards which support that philosophy.
Always Plan Ahead
Battles in Vampire Crawlers can be a marathon instead of a sprint. You might want to play an attack that kills off one extra enemy, or stack on enough armor to make sure you don’t take a single point of damage, but you must plan ahead.
So many of your stats reset after every battle, meaning you’re always weakest during turn one. Therefore, I always try and boost my stats and think about what is coming in the rest of my deck. Even if it means taking a bit of damage or not killing enemies as quickly, it’s best to avoid starting by playing cheap attacking and defensive moves.
This long-term thinking will mean you’ll take fewer hits overall and might allow you to decimate rows of enemies in a single move later on in the fight.
Defeat The Boss As Early As Possible
This tip might be controversial, and is certainly directed at players tackling a dungeon for the first time. But I would always recommend looking at your map and working out the path that gets you to the boss while facing as few enemies as possible.
When you’re quite evenly matched with the enemies in a new dungeon, I don’t think the potential upgrades you might gain are worth the hits to your health pool. The boss on a floor is likely to be the toughest challenge you’ll face. I feel it is wiser to clear this threat early and if you come out relatively unscathed, you’ll be safer to mop up the rest of the floor.
There’s undoubtedly a lot of value in collecting everything you can find. Doing it in the right order will push your further towards the end goal.
The Best Defense Is A Good Offense
I tend to play deck-building games with an extremely conservative approach. If there is a way to make it through a turn in Slay the Spire without taking any damage, I will twist and contort my tactics to make it happen. I don’t recommend that style for Vampire Crawlers.
You’ll likely face enemies on deeper floors and later dungeons who consistently deliver more damage than armor can account for. In these situations, status effects like Knockback will likely prevent more damage than you can defend with armor. The issue is you don’t know if it will succeed or how much damage it will prevent. But this high-risk-high-reward strategy will likely protect your health more than armor alone and will help you defeat enemies faster as well.
Exploit Your Vampire Survivors Knowledge
If you have a roll-out of weapons that work well for you in Vampire Survivors, put them to use here. If you’ve memorised all their evolutions, the same combinations will likely evolve in Vampire Crawlers. Fans of the original game are absolutely rewarded in this title.
And if you’ve never played it before, using a Vampire Survivors wiki might see you make progress monumentally faster in the new game.
Vampire Crawlers lives up to the lofty expectations set by the original game. With these tips at your disposal, you’ll be set to start mowing down hordes of enemies in no time.
Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors is available April 22 on PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X|S.
A review code for Vampire Crawlers was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this article.
