Vampire Survivors' new spin-off has hooked me (and Combolands could, too)
Plus: Krafton up, Xbox down, Roblox down, CCP left... and a PowerWash dev comment from 2021 that was suddenly relevant this week.
I think I really liked 2022 indie breakout Vampire Survivors. But I have long wondered if the game just made me think I liked it. Playing it felt great. Maybe too great?
In Vampire Survivors, you’re a hero warrior guy or a magician lady or maybe even an old man with some repellent garlic. From a top-down perspective, you see your hero swarmed by skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but no vampires, of course). You cannot manually attack your foes. The attacking is automatic, and you just move. As enemies are killed for you, they drop blue gems. Collecting them fills a bar. Filling the bar unlocks a selection of upgrades. Those upgrades can make your attacks more powerful or more frequent. Maybe they give you a second attack, perhaps some spinning books to supplement your whip or your lightning.
If you’ve played it, you know how smoothly Vampire Survivors draws you in and how tightly it keeps you from doing anything but play it. It chirps with slot-machine sounds. It fires off virtual fireworks as you crack open a treasure chest. That progress bar keeps filling up, and the rewards keep on coming. Where once you were weak, soon you’re strong.
Did I like Vampire Survivors? Or did I just like how much it felt like a constant celebration of mindless, near-endless winning?
(The one thing I was sure was genuinely good about the game was that my kids, my wife and I could easily play it together. That was indisputably wonderful.)
My too-many hours enraptured by Vampire Survivors led me to approach its first big spin-off, April’s Vampire Crawlers, with great caution.
Crawlers is played solo in a first-person perspective, one turn at a time, as your warrior man or magician lady dungeon-crawls through forests, bridges, libraries. I presume there eventually is, an actual dungeon but I haven’t spoiled myself. Each region is filled with enemies and the occasional treasure chest.
As I dove in, I heard the familiar slot machine sound effects and saw a progress bar that kept filling up as I killed skeletons, bats and very annoying preying mantis-like creatures (but, so far, no vampires).
Here we go again, I thought. Another seductively mindless game that I better be ready to tear myself from. Actually, I was wrong about the mindlessness.
I knew that combat in Vampire Crawlers is not automatic. Each attack or item is represented as a card, and battles are a matter of randomly drawing cards from a tiny deck into your hand, then playing them, registering their effects on the enemies, discarding them, earning more cards for your deck, shuffling and playing through it again. With each hand, you can choose which cards to play or play all of them in a single button press. I mistakenly thought the latter was the preferred action. After all, Vampire Survivors didn’t even want me to press a button to attack. Surely the gameplay joke of Crawlers is that I should just play all of the cards in my hand at once?
Incorrect!
I was initially playing Crawlers by spamming the all-cards-at-once option and the action was feeling as mindless as Survivors. But, as would be obvious with any other card-based game, Vampire Crawlers players are best served by choosing the right card to play each time. The key to the combat system involves card combos. The game’s attack cards, hero cards and item cards cost different amounts of magical mana points to play. The potency of those cards increases if you play card in the order of their mana cost. For example, you’d ideally first play a card that costs zero mana, then a card that costs one, then a two card, to keep the combo going. If you’re clever, you’ll work in wild cards, maybe turn a card’s value negative. Perhaps there are other tricks I’ve yet to discover to keep the combo going.
Once this combo system clicked, I realized that the gameplay in Vampire Crawlers is meant to be thoughtful, not mindless. When playing, I need to think about how I’m building my deck to increase the chance that my randomly drawn hand will contain cards I can combo consecutively. As I’ve been playing, I’ve needed to think about which new cards to grab, which ones to trash, all to build the most potent deck. I need to be strategic. If Vampire Survivors was a slot machine, maybe this is at least poker or craps.
As with Vampire Survivors, Crawlers is proving hard to quit. This time, I don’t feel as guilty when the minutes (or hours) stack up.
Bonus game recommendation: Combolands (PC demo)
A demo for Combolands was quietly released last month. It’s fascinating.
Combolands, formerly called Tiny Towns on itch, is a city-building game that is also played using a deck of virtual cards. In this game, cards represent the things you can build. A card will let you place huts, woodcutters, towers, farms, docks, fishing boats and more, across an island map.
The structures operate on timers that tick down the virtual days. Farms will yield crops after a certain number of days. The fishing boats will fish in a certain timeframe, at a specific range. Structures modify each other, adding range or, say, making the fishing boats cast their nets more frequently.
The goal is to get these things you’ve constructed to pay out more and more points by a specific deadline date. Mastering the layout and the timeline unlocks more cards and perks, as a low-scoring town becomes a high-scoring city.
Combolands takes a few rounds for it to click, but once it does, the demo proves to be terrific.
The game’s got a promising pedigree, too. Once of its two developers designed the great reverse-city-builder Terra Nil, which was all about turning landscapes that were spoiled by humanity back into unspoiled nature. I think they’re on to something special again.
No release date for the full game yet. Just “coming soon.”
Item 2: In brief…
🚫 French game studio Spiders (GreedFall, Steelrising) is shutting down. “We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years,” the studio stated on social media.
Regional video game union STJV blamed the shutdown on Spiders publisher/owner Nacon, alleging that poor business decisions will result in 71 workers being out of a job.
One day after Spiders’ announcement, Nacon announced that its delayed showcase of upcoming games will be held next week. Back in February, Nacon filed for insolvency.
🤔 Workers at Wizards of the Coast‘s Magic The Gathering Arena development team is unionizing, Aftermath reports.
🚀 Pearl Abyss is selling CCP Games (Eve Online) back to that studio’s management for $120 million, Inven Global reports, based on a regulatory filing.
Pearl Abyss scored a big hit this year with the role-playing game Crimson Desert. It purchased CCP back in 2018.
📉 Microsoft earlier this week reported a 7% decline in gaming revenue for the first three months of 2026, a drop of $380 million. The company cited a 5% drop in revenue from content and services and a 33% drop in hardware revenue, due to selling fewer consoles.
New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma took the unusual step of acknowledging that performance on social media, posting: “While we have made progress expanding the business and our margins, player and revenue growth has not yet met our ambition. We know we have work to do to earn every player today and into the future.”
Microsoft also forecast that Xbox content and services revenue for April-June 2026 will show a “decline in low-teens,” compared to the same months last year.
Last week, Sharma told me she wants to see the Xbox division “return to growth next year.”
👀 Roblox has reported 132 million daily active users for its platform for the first three months of 2026, up 35% from the year before. It also recorded revenue of $1.7 billion in bookings (player spending), up 39% from a year ago.
But the company’s stock plunged as much as 20% at one point on Friday.
A likely culprit: In its quarterly earnings report this week, Roblox cut its estimated bookings for 2026 by about $1 billion, down to $7.3-$7.6 billion. The company cited “the continuation of safety headwinds.” They’re referring to Roblox’s roll-out of mandatory age-checks that it says “will result in continued short-term headwinds to user acquisition and engagement.”
The age checks are kicking in as Roblox attempts to address the platform’s child safety concerns, which have spawned over 100 lawsuits. (Last month, Roblox agreed to pay $36 million to settle safety lawsuits from West Virginia, Alabama and Nevada.)
📈 Krafton has reported record revenue for the first quarter of 2026, at 1.4 trillion South Korean won ($932 million), driven by the performance of its long-running battle royale PUBG on PC and mobile.
Krafton is preparing to port inZOI, its PC-based Sims competitor, to consoles (it’s announced for PS5).
Through its Unknown Worlds studio, it will release Steam’s most-wishlisted game, Subnautica 2, into early access on May 14. That recently announced date, which the studio seems happy with, may explain why lawyers for Unknown Worlds’ reinstated CEO recently told a judge they are no longer upset about Krafton’s possible role in a March leak of the game’s May release timeframe.
💬 Here’s a fascinating game developer quote given to my former Kotaku colleague Joshua Rivera, writing for The Verge. This is from Housemarque’s Gregory Louden, co-writer and director of new, action-packed PS5 sci-fi game Saros, which tells much of its story through vague cinematic cutscenes:
“We’re also gonna make our cinematics about questions. The gameplay is the answer. So a lot of the time the cinematics are about setting things up or giving you questions to ask, and through the game experience, you answer them.”
😮 The five-year difference. Back in 2021, I interviewed developers at FuturLab who made the then newly-released Power Wash Simulator. The game’s producer revealed his dream filthy object to clean in the game: “That would be a wonderful thing to have six people running around cleaning the Millennium Falcon together… It would be a dream.” As I wrote at the time, there was no deal with Disney/LucasFilm to do any such thing. PWS was still very much an upstart game about cleaning dirty cars and buildings.
This week: FuturLab revealed a summer-slated add-on for PowerWash Simulator 2, a Star Wars Pack.
The trailer shows players cleaning a dirty X-Wing fighter, but, come on…surely the dream is about to come true? (Though, to be clear, the sequel supports up to four players, not six.)
Item 3: The week ahead
Tuesday, May 5
In the Black (PC), a “realistic space combat simulator with a serious respect for science,” Wax Heads (PC, console), a record store puzzle game, and Motorslice (PC, PlayStation, Xbox), a sci-fi parkour game set in “the ruins of a megastructure,” are released.
Thursday, May 7
Alabaster Dawn (PC, early access), a new role-playing game from the makers of CrossCode, and Mixtape (PC, console), a stylish interactive 80s teen drama, are released.
Saturday, May 9
The NYC Video Game Festival is held in downtown Manhattan..
I was eyeing Vampire Crawlers with full confidence I'd never play it. Too many things on my gaming plate with Windrose and the new Diablo 4 DLC. I wasn't feeling too bad about it, though, since I recently played something quite similar.
Even before Vampire Survivors I was hooked on Habby's Archero. It's fairly similar in terms of gameplay, but more adapted to mobile free-to-play with a richer meta progression. And I sank many more hours into it.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Habby dropped their own take on the "Balatro for X" formula that so many developers have been chasing by slapping poker combos onto their existing projects: Dicero. As the name suggests, you throw and reroll dice to score classic pairs and flushes. The Archero series has always leaned more toward a stage-based crawler compared to the infinite arenas of Survivors, so this change feels like a natural evolution.
But I can't shake the feeling that this additional depth isn't necessarily a good thing for these kinds of games. You play Survivors or Archero almost as a form of meditation, only briefly stopping to select an upgrade. With this new layer of decision-making on every turn, I lose that flow state. I get easily distracted, and I struggle to finish a session.