V Rising is a survival sim from the indie developer Stunlock Studios. Despite belonging to the thoroughly explored genre, the game turned out to be very fresh and interesting which is proven by over a million sold copies and extremely positive reviews from the community.
Let’s see what all the hype is about!
There are a great number of games that belong to the “survival sim” genre, including but not limited to Valheim, Conan Exiles, ARK: Survival Evolved. But V Rising is very different from all of them. To begin with, in V Rising you play as a vampire that had once been ruling over the lands of the living, but alas… Now your task is to restore your power, influence and interestingly enough rebuild your Castle.
In this game, you aren’t playing as goodie-two-shoes, but rather a bloodsucking vampire stuck in a world filled with dangers. Be it normal people, risen dead, werewolves, various monsters and other creatures – all of them are out to get you. And it is up to you to destroy, enslave, drink until there isn’t a drop of blood left anymore or make them your servants before they can get to you.
The game begins with the creation of your vampire character. And the first surprise you immediately run into is that sun being harmful to you is more than rumors. You also have to keep drinking blood in order to survive and do stuff. Blood sustains you for a short while. And, as comes from that, there is a lot of blood around – you just have to pick it up!
Silver burns your character, garlic is your enemy. And that dangerous holy magic… You have quite a few weaknesses. However, your powers are not something to sneeze at as well. The only pity is that you don’t belong to the top of the food chain… at first.
The type of blood you consume gives you a variety of buffs. Every source of blood has its own level, with level 1 being the weakest and level 5 being the strongest. At first, it might take a while to find the victims with a high enough level of blood.
The type of blood you choose can simplify your vampire’s un-life in the beginning: creature, worker, rogue, warrior, scholar and brute. For example, level 2 worker blood will give you a 10 to 30% increase in collecting resources. Meanwhile level 5 will boost it by another 30%.
Cooldown reduction, vampirism, attack speed or reducing the damage taken – all the types of blood have their own applications and bonuses.
In the early game, the worker blood might be the most useful and make your gameplay process that much more pleasant as you’d need A LOT of resources. This system is well thought out and implemented. You can capture prisons, keep them captive and pump their blood by keeping them in cages in your castle.
Once captive with level 5 blood is quite valuable and, believe me, you will have quite the bloodsucking competition when it comes to hunting for one.
The game does not feature randomly generated levels, so the map you are traversing will always be the same. As V Rising is meant both for the single-player and for the online multiplayer game style, it will not give different players a strong advantage against one another.
A dozen hours in solo play, you will already know approximately where you can get the things you need in certain quality and quantity, and other players are in the same position.
The next thing you might notice is how the world of the game is dynamic and living. While there is that single map available for everyone and known by everyone in varying degrees, you can still run into a patrol marching on a road, or factions clashing in the middle of nowhere or even a werewolf ripping a village apart.
The world is alive and there is nothing static about it. All living things in V Rising interact with one another: bosses fight each other, the undead cut out living patrols. A Stone Golem pounds some stupid villagers into the ground for being disturbed – and it it notices you, it will try to pound on you as well!
The world also welcomes players with very stylish and pleasant graphics. Beautiful dead fields, centuries-old forests, poisonous swamps inhabited by animals, fields of peasants, temples and ruins of castles – all of it is very nicely drawn and adds more charm to the world of V Rising.
Style is the most important thing in this world. You have a dozen options of the walls for your castle, in addition to windows, carpets, statues, torches, and much, much, MUCH more decorations.
Your castle is going to be your home, with its own Heart. The Heart serves as the center for your castle and it demands blood, otherwise it will start deteriorating and bringing the castle down around it.
It can also serve as your laboratory. Or as a place to rest with a soft chair and a large fireplace. Or maybe some lit braziers and a dozen prisoners? An army of servants in their own barracks, or a large dining room with paintings and other decorations. A production complex and an alchemy workshop, forges, jewelry tables and much more will be available to you.
And a lot of it is pretty much required. You will have to build a large number of various scientific, industrial and processing machines. Recycle a simple tree into bars, ore into ingots, research new technologies and recipes for clothes and jewelry. Create a botanical corner – where you can grow flowers for potions and crafting, an alchemical lab to process all of it and grow rats… and even graves for the undead so you can knock resources out of them instead of scouring the location for bones.
All of this requires space. A loooot of space.
And it is not a problem when you are playing in a solo game or on a private server with your friends, standard online servers feature many competing players. If you don’t manage to increase the territory of your castle and claim the area around it, your holdings will be reduced to a tiny piece of land. Just imagine trying to build the teleport gates that are simply huge in terms of the space they occupy!
There are plenty of resources on the map. Similar to blood, they are also divided into levels in a peculiar but thought-out way. The extraction of resources will be one of your ever-present pressing problems. Why, you ask? Bones, bronze, iron, silver and beyond. Leather, improved leather, silk, thread of different levels, gems for cutting and jewelry, various plants and herbs. bars and stones and processed resources of different levels – as I mentioned above, the game features a wide variety of resources that are needed to create everything.
Break simple pieces of stone, chop down trees, mine metals, fish in lakes and recycle it all. Stones into bars, bars into bricks, ordinary wood into boards, boards into ironed bars… and many more chains of processing and crafting that you will need to make your character stronger.
Why would it be important? Because V Rising does not feature the usual level system or experience points. You can kill a thousand peasants, chop hundreds of trees or spend hours mining ore, but you won’t advance a single level. However, equipping better armor and grabbing a new weapon will give you levels. Bone armor and weapons? Level 15-20. Bronze? 30. Iron? 40-50, and so on. You will be upgrading your gear step by step, upgrading the basic equipment and creating new better sets of armor and weapons. You can’t kill a boss of level 50 while you yourself are about 20, you just won’t hurt it.
The game features a wide variety of bosses, with each providing your vampire with special abilities and knowledge. When you kill a standard enemy, it will simply fall and its blood will be absorbed by earth. Meanwhile, defeated bosses achieve the state of almost-death, allowing you to drink their blood and learn a new technology, ability or even an ultimate skill.
Abilities also allow you to interact with the world in various ways: turning into a wolf to run faster, shapeshifting into a bear for extra health and damage, swapping into a mouse to slip by open-world PvP, even taking on the shape of a bat to fly across the world.
All of those abilities can be unlocked by fighting bosses, but to do that you need better gear and to acquire that you’ve gotta hunt and collect a castle-full of resources.
Every boss is unique and has their own patterns of behavior. The Swordsman master, for example, is a fight based on evasion. Meanwhile the nun summons her guards while she herself is not above blasting you with holy magic. Wandering vampire hunters roaming the world remain a threat even by the end of the game. Running into an entire group poses a serious danger right up to long minutes spent running away from them.
On Online servers you can join the Clans, and members can immediately dress you up in good gear to boost you to their level.
The combat system in the game awes with its visual part. With the stylish abilities, every battle turns into something spectacular.
Every weapon in the game has a purpose. The sword gives a bonus to the extracted plans, a mace to the extracted stone, an ax to the amount of acquired wood. But in addition to giving you bonuses to the resource gathering, the weapons also boost your battle capabilities.
The ax will allow you to create spinning axes in the selected area, while the sword lets you become a whirlwind of steel and chop your enemies to bits. The scythe elegantly slices up everyone, living or dead (but especially dead). The crossbow allows you to deal some damage from afar while the mace lets you jump to the enemy and stun them.
Additionally, all weapons have their styles and methods of use. Do you want to quickly slice and dice an enemy? Equip daggers. Do you prefer to keep at a distance? Then the spear is your choice.
Extra abilities unlock with the increased level of your gear. The Bone weapons only have normal strikes, while Iron gear has two abilities to offer. The overall damage also increases with the quality of gear.
But it takes more than equipping weapons from cursed silver to make you the top of the food chain. Your level and damage are based on the entirety of your gear, including armor and jewelry, so you will have to upgrade everything as you go.
As good as the game is, it still has its drawbacks.
One of them is a huge need for resources. You will need tons, literally thousands of units of resources to progress. And gathering them with a small inventory is no easy task. You can teleport from castle to the map waypoint, but returning back with resources is a no go (unless you are playing on a server with modified rules). Lengthy process of gathering, then rushing to the castle, rinse and repeat. Gather iron ore, silk, thread, skin and bones, trudge to the castle to deposit all of it, notice that you are short a couple of units and back into the world you go to grind some more.
Secondly, if you play on a server with the standard rule set, crafting will take a lot of real time. Smelting one iron ingot takes 2 minutes of real time and no, you can’t leave the game while the crafting process is going on, as it is based on you being in the game. You can still venture out to farm resources and beat bosses, but you must stay in the game.
A normal iron sword requires 20 ingots, so it would require 40 minutes of just smelting enough ore. Add to it skin processing, bones, wood and more – and even with the acceleration from the castle it takes a huge amount of time.
When it comes to resources, V Rising turns into a simulator of a bloodsucking hamster: players have to stuff all their resources into both cheeks, grab a few knapsacks and bags and waddle back to the castle to start the processing.
The third minus is the lack of space for building your castle. If you play on a server with at least 50 players online, you will find it very hard to build your castle and fight for territory. At least the abandoned castles quickly deteriorate and break from the lack of blood!
Gimme a way to create a giant citadel for myself, friends, clan, captives and servants! Give us a SECOND FLOOR!
Last but not least: playing alone can be a bit boring. The world stays the same, there is no random generation of maps even if the available space is beautifully drawn and has respectable size. Without a story campaign to follow, it is hard to play for more than a couple of days solo.
Despite the mentioned drawbacks, the game is still quite a pleasure to play.
V Rising features about 40 main bosses plus the additional ones. Each boss has their own patterns of behavior that change up the way their battle plays out. You will not find two boss battles that are alike.
Construction: your castle is an expression of your talent and desires. The game features dozens of options for just the floor. Add to it torches, statues, paintings, etc. The castle is a place to express yourself – and to complain at the lack of space.
Graphics and aesthetics of the world, gorgeous and visually spectacular combat system, unusual character development system – V Rising has it all.
Amazing work with lighting deserves its own point. The game features dynamic changes of day and night. And if at night you can calmly wander around the world, during the day you will have to hide in the shadows.
After all, the sunlight can harm and ultimately kill your vampire. In the game, the shadows move according to the position of the sun. Noon will see you hiding in a dozen trees just to avoid burning. Close to the sunset? The shadows from a couple of stones will be enough to fight a boss and have some extra area for a small picnic.
An option for highly flexible server settings. You can create your own server: PvP, PvE, resource-gathering, bloody battles amongst the local clans – it’s all up to you. Will the blood be spent almost immediately or flow forever in your veins? Eliminating the constant need to hunt, adding fast crafting, teleports without limits and MUCH more.
Servers can be configured to meet any taste: hardcore, softcore, standard, immediate unlock of all buildings and best gear at once, losing everything on death, etc. The choice is yours.
Huge servers filled with players. Once you login onto the server, you can immediately start chatting, join clans, organize wars or hop into boss hunts.
Very smooth learning system. No unnecessary questions arose for tens of hours. To that end, an equally comfortable in-game map with the option to put down your own marks.
To sum it up, the developers have created a very interesting game. As you play V Rising, you can immediately tell that this game was not created as a cash grab. The team relied on quality over a number of paid DLC with extra decor and quests for a few bucks here and there.
V Rising turned out to be extremely lively, rich and… finished. Even in Early Access, the game feels complete with its beautifully-designed systems. All systems connect to one another, there is no purely combat system or purely craft system. Instead, everything harmoniously connects together.
If you like survival sims and the gothic aesthetic, V Rising should definitely have a place in your library.
