V Rising Review

Early Access has rapidly become a proving ground for developers to implement community feedback to grow and improve their games. Baldur’s Gate 3 spent a significant period in Early Access but only hinted at the windfall of content Larian would unleash on players. And while the moniker can be wielded in strange ways, it feels like a net positive for both players and developers who wish to support each other.

V Rising‘s first mention fell into my inbox two years ago. At the time I had conflated it with Vampire Survivors, with good reason of course. But with a usually full schedule, Early Access games are hard to cover efficiently, especially as updates trickle in over the months and years. But my eye always hovered V Rising, curious as to what it actually was. An action game? A survival game? A crafting one?

Now, with V Rising out of its Early Access period and finally available on PlayStation 5, I thought it would be great to dive into the experience to see how this hodgepodge of genres and ideas translated into a full game.

To call V Rising dense would be appropriate considering its lofty goals of crafting a kind of “vampire fantasy” that allows players to exist as a blood-sucking creature of the night. Developer Stunlock Studios framed their world as a pastiche of varying bits of vampire lore and media. And because so many games featuring vampires either paint them as antagonists, Belmont fodder, or immortal action heroes, it almost sounds a little silly to express anything one might do as any kind of fantasy or simulation.

V Rising may initially raise eyebrows when the game’s first night is over and the sun begins to rise. The thick wooded area past the crypt where I first emerged out of my coffin suddenly had shadows being cast. Stalks of opaque black danced over puddles and rocks while deer and wolves trotted around. Running through an open patch, a beam of light suddenly shone like a spotlight on my vampire creation, inching closer to them by the second. Once that shaft of sunlight hits, health begins to rapidly drain.

And you may think “duh, the sun can burn vampires,” but it isn’t a facet of the vampire mythos we see used in any meaningful way. And guess what? Things like silver and garlic come into play as well, debuffing or lowering stats when equipped or encountered and coated in the poisonous stuff. It may be a touch that sounds annoying but it is quite appropriate for the general loop of V Rising and the mood it tries to craft for players.

As a vampire cast out from the world almost to the point of fading out of memory, players emerge to stake their claim back into this gothic fantasy world. V Rising starts out with players being able to create a customizable vampire with various hairstyles, faces, and colors. With a basic slash attack, our vampire works its way through a crypt hacking away at skeletons and… collecting wood, stone, and bone.

Almost instantaneously, Stunlock Studios incorporates the two pillars of its game into V Rising. An objective pops up requiring players to craft a weapon and a piece of armor out of bone. A level up and the game asks to fulfill a few simple combat trials using the two powers currently available. And within minutes, the game begins to spin out objectives to acclimate players to the logic of the gameplay loop.

In the first 10 or 15 minutes, V Rising acts as a kind of Diablo-esque ARPG where players use abilities on cooldown to kill foes. Then that becomes hunting down animals to drain them of their blood, which opens up abilities that consume blood. But as night cracks into day and the sun begins to paint its light over the land, some kind of safety needs to be claimed. Players are then asked to construct the basics of their vampire’s castle. This early on in the game, it is made up of basic floors and walls, a place to put a coffin and a chest.

Crafting games tend to escalate in an appropriate way, poking holes in the depth of the world around them. Players may have noticed a couple rocks or bears or spiders that either can’t be damaged or are too powerful because they are too high level. After the basics of a castle are built, the player is told they need to start refining materials. This creates a small loop of breaking down the nearby rocks and trees to have enough stone and wood to build the appropriate crafting stations and have the materials necessary to create and kill better quality things.

Understandably, V Rising initially feels like a game too concerned with castle building rather than actually going into the world and killing things and draining blood. And it can be an accurate assessment based on how the player wishes to tailor their experience. An option exists to play V Rising on a public server that other players inhabit or a private world where the player can control who visit. Either option comes with their own obvious caveats. In a public server, players can band together and tackle challenges as a group. That being said, other players can also attack the castles of other vampires in a quest to gain map dominance or simple be a rude neighbor.

Most of my time in V Rising was spent in a world of my own creation. I did not initially tinker with anything that cut down crafting and gathering time or toned down the difficulty of encounters. I found the combat to be relatively fair, fully knowing when I had found myself in the midst of enemies far beyond my level. Additionally, early days of building up the castle didn’t seem too time consuming or laborious for the speeds I expected. But I completely understand why a subset of players may appreciate the ability to adjust those requirements so they can get to the actual combat.

Either way, the loop is relatively satisfying in terms of earning and building power. It is a fun, expressive way to take your vampire out into the world, gathering resources and killing things all for the purpose of buffering a blood-sucking empire. Killing skeletons to craft bone armor and weapons to get strong enough to face deadlier and more fantastical beasts to craft items infused with magic is a process that RPGs don’t make feel so personal. While this isn’t akin to Monster Hunter in terms of sheer variety, the full game has a long list of equipment that supplements certain styles of play rather than focusing solely on raising damage and resistance stats.

I also truly enjoyed the sheer act of building a castle. It is one thing when a game tasks players with building a home or a fort that will act as a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s another to expand and decorate an actual vampire castle that can become a moody beacon of power and death. While I often don’t have the commitment to really dig into games with robust crafting and building systems, V Rising amplifies the experience based on the tone of its world and how relatively easy it all is to understand. Walls, floors, crafting stations, decorations, it all comes in a particularly gothic flavor that separates itself from a genre that is often very focused on realism or the fantastical.

While V Rising isn’t a looker by any stretch of the imagination, Stunlock Studios’ attention to the world got me past some lackluster character models and murky biomes that are relatively familiar in games like this. V Rising has an identity but one that meshes with familiarity in a bid to help players recognize what they are fighting and interacting with. Attacks have a pungent flair to them and monsters are relatively gruesome. It is all done with a graphical touch that allows for several moving pieces without looking dated or bland.

Ultimately, the quest for a vampire’s power lies in the ability to drain the blood of helpless and not-so-helpless victims. Interestingly, V Rising requires players to consistently feed their castle’s core blood essence that is earned from kills. Doing so prevents the castle from losing power, crumbling, and becoming invaded by other players. In public servers, this requires regular visits to keep up maintenance while in private, that restriction is severely lighter.

Blood as one of the core pieces of focus makes sense in any vampire-related story but its importance in combat really drew me further into V Rising. As players begin to suck the blood of enemies, they will receive buffs based on the enemy type and the quality of the blood. Tiered benefits will allow the player to almost take on varying classes that one may expect from an ARPG. Creature blood can increase sun resistance and buff damage, making it great for players to start with as animals like deer and wolves are plentiful in the beginning. Players can kill different kinds of humans like workers to increase building and crafting stats, warriors to increase cooldowns, or rogues to increase movement spend.

While it may seem like an obvious mechanic, it’s cleverly implemented in V Rising to the point where players are able to min-max goals based on absorbing a greater quantity and quality of specific blood. And as useful as that aspect of V Rising is, the main targets should be the over 50 bosses in the game who hold V Blood.

V Blood acts differently because killing a boss will grant players a pool of new powers and skill to use during combat. Players will also be rewarded new crafting recipes from these elite kills. For players exhausted by the prospect of a game that features a single sword or helmet that can have a handful of dozens of random stats attached to it at once, V Rising is a breath of fresh air. While the game does center around increasingly efficient loot, there’s hard limits to what can be expected. As such, the set goal of acquiring more V Blood and the reward of new skills and new recipes feeds into the loop of how players should expect to further their progression.

It may not be complicated in writing but the sheer amount of builds that can be created in V Rising allows players the opportunity to create an ARPG vampire fantasy that suits their needs. Combat is crucial in mastering as players need to understand the synergy between the few skills they are allowed to equip and then use those in survival to collect more materials for castle building. This is not an unfamiliar cycle of gameplay systems but it’s obvious that the time spent in Early Access and retaining player feedback has worked well for V Rising. There’s a dearth of content available for players, especially those who are coming to it for the first time. I played the game on PlayStation 5, the version which released a few weeks after the full launch on PC. And my only genuine complaint is that with the number of menus and points of interaction, V Rising can feel a little clumsy on a DualSense until players become acclimated to switching between inventory menus, splitting stacks of materials, and properly targeting the right object or foe. Otherwise, the satisfaction of playing on a console versus a PC is down to preference.

V Rising possesses a surprising blend of genres that weave together to incorporate a kind of “vampire simulation” no other game has accomplished. Survival, crafting, and ARPGs may not be the most obvious harmony at first blush but the deeper players go, the more rewards will be reaped. Staring from the balcony of my castle crafted from harvesting the blood of my foes and the innocent, I could not help but give a fanged smile at this satisfying, gothic fantasy.