Review - V Rising

I have no idea how to class the new Vampire game from Stunlock Studios. At its core V Rising is a survival game with some RPG elements, but it is so much more than that, so let's take a dive into what makes V Rising different from other survival games.

The character creation is basic, choose sex, some hair, maybe a beard. There are some cosmetic things available but the way the camera is set (top-down kind of like Diablo) it doesn't seem necessary.

Once you create your vampire you are thrown into an unforgiving world, full of humans, monsters, and mutants.

There are so many things to unpack with V Rising, so let's start with the core mechanics of any survival game resource gathering and crafting.

V Rising starts off with gathering the basics, wood, stone, pelts which you get from trees, rocks, and animals respectively. These are the raw materials that need to be broken down using different structures like sawmills and grinders.

Resourse gathering can be sped up by using the right tools

The first set of quests revolve around building up your castle and getting to grips with the different crafting mechanics.

The castle building is very in-depth with a lot of cosmetics to place around, like hedge mazes or floating candles to make the crypts feel even creepier. Each piece of crafting structure is unlocked by defeating certain bosses and is assigned to a different "˜room'. You are rewarded by placing similar crafting structures in the same room with the correct floor to unlock advanced crafting speed or even lower resource requirements for items.

Grouping similar crafting equipment inside the same room will increase productivity

The map is split up into 8 separate areas each with their own set of resources, so you are forced to go out exploring to advance, but these areas are teeming with enemies of various levels, making it difficult to advance too quickly.

Speaking of advancement V Rising doesn't reward you with XP from killing enemies or crafting items its all about gear score. Now seems to be a great time to talk about the combat. Usually with survival games the combat is pretty lackluster, however with V Rising the combat is fantastic, it feels like a top-down dungeon crawler, dodging, casting spells and slashing your way through cultists, mutants, demons and even technical anomalies. There are 5 different types of weapons, blades, clubs, axes, whips, scythes, and pistols. Each one has its onset of moves and feels very different to use. There are 6 different skill classes with 8 different abilities in each class. You can have 2 active at once but these can changed whenever you want. These abilities really allow you to customize your fighting style. You can summon skeletons and tornadoes of lightening, you can rip open the ground and cause an eruption of dark magic to knock back enemies, you can even turn into blood and dash through your enemies ripping the very life force from their bodies.

Tearing the soul out of someone named Gore Crusher seems fitting

Advancement is locked behind a set of bosses, 37 to be exact. Each boss has a suggested level you need to be to fight it, you can attack any boss whenever you feel like it, but they will annihilate you if you are not prepared. Once you beat a boss it will unlock some new structures for your castle, maybe a new weapon or some armor that are a few levels above what you have now, or even new abilities. So, the idea is to slay a boss, farm resources until you can take on the next boss.

With 37 bosses V Rising makes you work for your next meal

Becoming the Ultimate Hunter.

Like any good vampire story V Rising revolves around blood. You are a Vampire, so you don't need to eat or drink, but you do need to feed. You have a blood pool that you use to heal yourself or morph onto different animals, it lasts along time but there is a fun mechanic where every single enemy has different blood quality. Different types of blood give you different boosts to your stats, so you have to keep one nostril open for that pure blood. You can even build a prison in you castle and kidnap unsuspecting townsfolk so you can have all the blood you will ever need, or have them serve you as Thralls, sending them off to scavenge for resources while you are doing more important things.

Can you even call yourself a Vampire without a few Thralls

Did I mention there was a day/night cycle? And yes, Sunlight hurts you. The game loop is very satisfying, spend the night hunting for blood, farming resources, killing bosses, then when the sun comes up return to you castle and upgrade for the next night of hunting.

Being a night owl, you have alot of time to decorate you Castle

The map is gorgeous. Each different area is exquisitely designed, from eerie forests, snowy mountains and my favorite, steam punk cities with mechanical monstrosities wandering the streets. There are also areas protected by garlic and holy symbols, I'll let you figure out what happens when you enter these areas unprepared.

Harnessing the power of lightning doesnt seem safe

Play how you want.

V Rising is a long slow grind, requiring a lot of time gathering to build your castle, but you can change the settings to not require so many resources to build things, or collect more from each source removing the "survival" part of it and play it as an RPG if you feel like it. Just be warned these can only be changed at the start of your map and you can only have one private map at once. I wanted to have a little play with some of the settings not realizing it will delete my other game.

V Rising has a lot to offer, from survival mechanics to a great vampire simulator. Like all survival games it is a substantial grind to experience everything the castle building has to offer, so I would recommend changing some of the setting to reduce the time it takes.