Translated by The Translator

Releasing in 2026, a classic roguelike sequel, a card game — yes, it’s Vampire Crawler.

The developer, as expected of someone who makes slot machines, takes the thrill up a notch compared to Vampire Survivors, especially with the infinite output when overkilling enemies. So satisfying!

However, the game content is relatively limited. After unlocking the continuous character buffs in the late game, combining with yellow draw cards easily allows for infinite card play, and you can achieve it casually every run, so the difficulty vanishes instantly.

Pseudo 2D

A distinctive feature of this installment is placing the character in a 2D maze made of grid cells. Although the environment uses low-poly 3D assets with a pixel filter, and the monsters use direct 2D sprites (from the previous game), the effect looks unexpectedly good. In fact, this approach could be completely transferred to other games (2D characters really work), and I’ll try it in the future. However, the game’s visual presentation looks good largely thanks to significant post-processing filters and the choice of 3D assets.

Although there is movement and rotation, in most cases you just need to look at the minimap. By the way, this visual style might actually work pretty well for low-budget horror games.

Card Nerd

The core mechanic of this game is using cards in a cost sequence to trigger combos; card effects are multiplied based on the combo count. In the late game, a large number of versatile cards are provided to extend combos, easily reaching over a hundred combos. The upside is that it’s indeed very satisfying, but the downside is that deck building and card play order become almost irrelevant. In the late game, you basically have a universal opening sequence that leads to unlimited firepower. This game should be considered an action game disguised as a card game.

Honestly, the content is quite limited, especially the deck building, which is essentially just one playstyle (the draw deck is too powerful). There should be a lot more updates in the future.