I have played a plethora of titles throughout my gaming career, especially those that fall into the MMORPG or Survival category. Very few of those titles can blend both MMORPG and survival together into one and keep me engaged for more than a few days. V Rising is one of those games you can simply get lost in for days at a time and very seldom get bored.
Though some things could be changed, fixed, or even added to the game to make it better, the game is extremely fun and a great survival-craft sandbox to sink your teeth into for hours upon hours.
Becoming the Vampire of Your Dreams
I’m going to start this off here because this is probably where the game lacks the most options. There are few options for customization for your vampire at the start, as you can only pick from a few features and hairstyles. With that said, there are several color options to choose from for skin tone and hair color, but overall, the character creation section is very lackluster.
Once your vampire is created and ready to go, the real fun begins as you arise gloriously from your coffin to embark on your journey. The beginning gameplay helps to get into the groove, as it shows you where to go, what to do, how everything works, and how to utilize the crafting system. The amount of detail in the tutorials in V Rising is amazing and never left me asking how to do something or where to find a menu. The devs really thought of everything to show budding vampires the ropes.
The vast and expansive world may appear small when looking at the map, but I assure you, especially before getting different forms that increase movement speed or travel points to fast travel, it takes quite a bit of time to get from one side to the other. This was especially felt when I chose to venture into the daytime, the sunlight burning into my vampire’s sensitive skin. This mechanic makes traversing the world more challenging, as the sunlight can burn any vampire to the bone if they aren’t careful. This is a nice touch, really staying true to what we know from Vampire lore.
Traveling with fast travel points is much easier, but it does have a major downside – there are a lot of things you cannot teleport with such as ores, cloth, and many other materials you gather along the way. This is a downer, but there are caves throughout the map that allow you to get from one side to the other rapidly with all of your gathered materials. This brings me to my next point; material gathering.
If you’ve played any other survival game, then gathering resources will be familiar; however, specific weapons can be crafted that make it go by much faster. Take the Mace, for example, which, when used, does 25% more damage to minerals, making mining much easier. Another plus to gathering is the amount of materials you get per node, which goes much further than most survival craft games. Mining minerals feels plentiful, and one round of hacking a rock to extract those sweet resources is often enough to start crafting right away.. This makes it feel as if I didn’t have to sit and just grind out materials to craft something, though the workload does scale in the late game.
Suckling the life from Bosses
This feature is easily my new favorite, and let me explain why. In the early access version of V Rising, you had to kill a specific boss to get a specific ability to use in battle. Let’s use an early boss like Keely the Frost Archer as an example. Keely used to give a particular frost spell called Frost Bat, which made V Rising feel extremely linear, as she had to be killed off to get this spell if you wanted it in your toolkit.
You also couldn’t even see the spell they dropped until after they were defeated, which made things pretty annoying when wanting to get a certain spell. Let’s say you favor ranged Chaos magic spells. You couldn’t tell who dropped what until they were slain and suckled dry of their V Blood, making it pretty annoying to determine what bosses should be killed early on. You had to make your decision based on the recipes and stations they dropped rather than something that could really benefit you in the long run.
Stunlock seems to have listened to feedback on this, and in version 1.0, they made it so that bosses now drop a skill point within a set of spells rather than a specific spell. Again, take Keely, the Frost Archer, who now just drops a Frost Spell Point, allowing vampires to choose which tier 1 frost spell to grab rather than only being able to have Frost Bat.
This change made the game much more enjoyable, as I no longer needed to run and kill a boss to get a spell if it wasn’t necessary. Yes, bosses also drop essential crafting stations and recipes, which are required along the way, but now you can pick and choose who you want to kill first rather than being forced to take someone down you struggle with just to get a spell.
Nicholaus the Fallen is a great example of this for me, and the bane of my entire existence in V Rising. This boss is no joke. He pummels you with these chaos bolts rapidly while summoning a horde of skeletons that will ruin your day if not killed quickly. I died on this boss about ten times before finally knocking him to his knees, only to find out the spell he drops isn’t even that great.
The fact that you can now see what type of spell point they drop, and that they drop spell points in general, is a huge bonus. It lets you plan ahead rather than get murdered repeatedly by a boss who gives you subpar spells.
The “Questline” and Story...or lack thereof
One interesting thing about V Rising is that there is no story to be told or main story quest line to follow. There is, however, almost a tutorial of sorts to follow to level up your castle heart and learn the ropes to gain new items, make progress, and unlock certain things you will absolutely need along the way. While it isn’t a traditional questline, it doesn’t make it anymore less challenging to complete these tasks.
To give a bit of insight as to how important completing these objectives is, I spent over two hours trying to kill bosses to figure out how to unlock the new Eye of Mortium, only to realize that it was locked behind the objective progression that I refused to complete because I thought it wasn’t necessary.
Completing these main objectives unlocks several things, but they don’t tell a story or send me on crazy missions. It’s mostly “craft this and interact with it” or use a specific item you have already unlocked.
I wish there was more lore to follow along with, especially given that V Rising is basically about your vampire being hunted down like a rabid dog by the different bosses. I wish that to fight Dracula, you needed to understand how and why he took over the Ruins of Mortium, or how exactly Simon Belmont got the call to come and destroy a blood-sucking leech running rampant through Vardoran.
Weirdly, though, despite this, V Rising doesn’t necessarily feel like it's missing anything without having a story to follow, but I think it definitely couldn’t hurt to add some form of lore or even a quest or two to give more context.
Final Thoughts
Overall, V Rising has many elements that keep things fun, engaging, and easy to get lost in for literal days at a time. The full launch might bring a lot of old players back, as it brings new content and massive amounts of new crafting tables, bosses, features I won’t mention for the sake of spoilers, and just better quality-of-life features than the early access version.
Starting over when the game launches seems to be the best bet since there are new early bosses who drop items and recipes you need later down the line. But will everyone enjoy the changes as much as I did? Only time will tell.
Full Disclosure: A copy of the game was provided by PR for the purposes of this review. Reviewed on PC via Steam.
