I had a really hard time knowing if I’d like V Rising from the very beginning. It’s been in early access forever and every time I looked at it the game would be doubling or tripling down on its castle building mechanics. “New carpets,” it would say. “Torches for your pillars,” it would boast. “Support us with this DLC pack that’s nothing but colors of stone for your walls,” the new update would declare. As someone without a creative bone in their body the idea of a game that leaned so heavily on making a castle (or even worse: a castle you can’t even do anything in) seemed like something that would never really gel with me. So I kept it on my wish list for all this time, checking in every so often and not seeing anything to convince me it would be a game that I would end up enjoying, but really hoping I could be persuaded. Eventually it was officially released last month to much praise and I saw one comment that sold me on trying it: “the combat is like Hades.” Since I hadn’t seen much about the combat but had seen universally across reviews that the game’s bosses were a highlight, I figured that was enough of a recommendation to give it a try.
To be clear, V Rising‘s combat is nowhere near Hades. While Hades is a tight, occasionally frantic isometric game that uses a lot of dodging and crazy special abilities to take down enemies and bosses that rely on telegraphed AOE attacks, V Rising is an occasionally frantic isometric game that has dodging and special abilities to take down enemies and bosses that rely on telegraphed AOE attacks. Let me explain what I mean. V Rising has, on paper, a very similar combat system to Hades: you can attack with preset combos using a variety of weapons and magical attacks while dodging/blocking the counter attacks of enemies that use regular attacks and AOE attacks with enough wind up that you can easily avoid them. The catch here is that almost all of V Rising‘s abilities are based on cooldowns while Hades is not, so V Rising‘s combat is inherently much slower and also more punishing, but not punishing in a fun way as it becomes more a challenge of managing your cooldowns for dodges (eight seconds between dodges, by the way) and special attacks than any sort of actual mechanical skill.
There is still mechanical skill involved to be sure. Bosses don’t just sit still waiting for you kill them, so knowing when to keep your distance and when to use any sort of dodge, defensive magic, or simply a well-timed side step all comes into play. But inevitably in every fight you’ll press a button to use any given spell or ability and get a pop-up countdown on your screen, and it’s never fun to see. Some might equate this to running out of stamina in Souls games to which I would say two things: there are all sorts of ways to counter balance the stamina loss from dodging/attacking in Souls games, and I don’t think anyone would compare combat in Souls games to something like Ninja Gaiden. This is essentially what the V Rising vs Hades comparison is in terms of combat, with V Rising being the more deliberate and restrained of the two while Hades is a wild cat in a tumble drier.
The similarities are a little fairer in the boss fight department, as both games have unique and layered boss encounters that will inevitably require build considerations to overcome. However while Hades had less than a dozen bosses that you fought repeatedly, V Rising has over fifty that you need to beat before you’ve completed the game. At time of writing I haven’t beaten all of them (Elden Ring‘s DLC is days away) but at the tail end of act two the bosses have been a good variety with only a few of the archer bosses feeling a little repetitive. There’s the bosses that will fight you one on one, the bosses that will throw traps around as you’re fighting to make the terrain treacherous, and the bosses that will summon basic enemies to fight you alongside them, but there’s also a few more unique encounters thrown in that you don’t find too often in other games.
Something else you don’t find too often in other games is how you can stalk the bosses until you get into a more advantageous position to fight them. So many other open world games with boss fights root their bosses in castles or other specifically scripted environmental arenas, but many of the bosses in V Rising are either wandering the countryside or patrolling between numerous villages. This opens a surprising number of strategic options for when you engage them, though generally the answer is “when there aren’t other enemy patrols around.” It can get a little deeper than that, as there are multiple “factions” in the game (undead, humans, beasts, other vampires, etc) that fight opposing factions in either scripted or organic encounters while you go about your merry vampire way. This means you can lure them into fighting each other to soften up a particularly hard wandering boss or group of soldiers before you engage, or if you follow a boss around long enough they may get to a more open/closed area of the map that will be better for you. One boss that I was having an especially hard time with early on just decided to randomly leave his regular patrol path and go for a walk outside one time, and even though the sun was up while I was fighting him it was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Yes, “the sun was up.” V Rising is a “survival crafting” game at heart and one of the things you have to survive is the sun. The game is relatively generous in this regard, letting you quickly dash from shadow to shadow with sun exposure not dealing any permanent damage as long as you’re quick (it’s also generous about what a “shadow” is), and you can actually go a very long time without having to drink blood as well, which limits the other frustrations with food and exposure that other survival games can be bogged down with. However you will be spending a lot of time gathering resources and building your castle to help give you a reliable place to hide while making yourself new weapons and equipment. This is where I was worried V Rising and I would fall apart, regardless of how good the combat was. Fortunately there’s a number of game mechanics both in-game and behind the scenes that make the grind a little more bearable, such as the server settings before a game even starts. V Rising was designed with co-op PvE and PvP in mind (more on that later) and those games are intended to be long bouts with customizable server settings, where you can adjust everything from castle size limits to weapon durability to how many resources you gather at a time.
I’ll say that if you hate grinding for resources you may want to crank that slider all the way, as I turned the one in my game to double the resources and I’m still frustrated about needing to occasionally stop what I’m doing to chop down trees, rocks, and passing farmers for wood, stone, and precious, precious thread. My experience is obviously just one person’s in a game that’s full of RNG drops and unlocks determined by the order you fight bosses, but I found myself increasingly annoyed by the occasional bottlenecks that would arise because of the crafting and level mechanics. You see, you don’t actually “level up” in V Rising in so much as you keep finding better and better equipment that increases your “gear level” that way and determines your overall power. In some ways it’s like a more depressing Diablo where your main source of damage isn’t from your character growth but from that new weapon you found, only in V Rising‘s case it’s from that new weapon you have to make, and to make it you need to get six pieces of glass and the only way to learn how to make glass is to kill a boss that’s four levels higher than you. So either you try to farm glass from other parts of the world or you pull up your big boy pants and fight a boss that’s over tuned against you just because you haven’t made a bigger pair of pants yet since that requires a special kind of leather to make and THAT boss is eight levels higher than you… Then once you get your glass and your leather you steamroll (or at least only take one or two tries) through the next three to six bosses until you hit ANOTHER bottleneck, and then you start all over again. I imagine this would be less frustrating in some instances if the resource drop rate was through the roof, but in others the items you need simply don’t appear to drop in the world unless you’re in environments far beyond your level.
Castle building is equally bottlenecked by resources but is far less frustrating in other areas. Walls/floors are almost entirely made of wood and/or stone, which is readily available even without double resource drop rate, and unless you’re on a PvP server your castle will never be in danger of being destroyed after you build it. V Rising also completely refunds structures that you disassemble or just overwrite (such as replacing a wall with a doorway), which is very generous for a resource gathering game, but for me the true highlight comes in how the game “tricks” you into actually building a castle. As I said earlier I’m horrifically creatively challenged and while there are many things that you need in your home base (resource creation tables, research stations, crafting smithies, etc) I didn’t think I’d find any reason why I’d do anything more than throw them all together in one empty, one floor castle with a roof on it and call it a day. Admittedly that was what my castle looked like for a while as I ran the mad dash gauntlet of the game’s tech tree from wood and copper to stone and iron, with my furnaces sitting right next to my tannery and my sawmill next to my research desk, but then the game started pushing different types of castle floors on me.
You see, in V Rising you can reduce the time it takes for resources to be refined and produced if the work station is in an enclosed room, but you can also reduce the amount of resources required to make those refined items if they’re in an enclosed room with a certain type of flooring. These types of flooring are really just archetypal names for different kinds of floor designs (workshop flooring is wood paneled, tailor flooring is a rug, smithy flooring is rough metal, etc.) but if you put the right resource stations in a room with that kind of flooring suddenly you’re getting discounts on everything you produce. Not only that but you also then have the same sorts of production facilities next to each other so rooms start to build themes around themselves. Your workshop room makes a lot of supplies that you use for building in the castle so maybe it’s best in a central location. Your research and tailor facilities use similar materials (thread, plant fiber) so maybe you should have them closer together. Hmm the castle is getting a little crowded with all these rooms, you could try adding a second story to give yourself a little more space for everything. And hey it doesn’t make much sense to keep all these storage boxes of items scattered around the castle so you may as well organize them and put them in relevant rooms so you know where everything is… and just like that you have a well organized if not aesthetically pleasing castle.
All of these features are of course optional and meant more for streamlining your experience rather than being necessary for progression, but damn if it didn’t trick me into actually putting thought into my castle design. There are scores of places you can build your castle as well and you can more or less freely move your castle between different locations, so outside of time invested in building/rebuilding your castle every time you want to move to a new area you aren’t losing anything. If anything the worst part about the castle building outside of the grind for resources (and the general need to build a castle if you aren’t into that) is the occasional weird interaction with the way the building mechanics work. Almost everything in V Rising that you can build can be moved by degrees to properly fit it into whatever location you’re trying to place it, but walls need to be built on the sides of floors and the big wide staircases never seem to line up perfectly with the natural entrances to your castles (at least in the three locations I’ve built so far) which is a bit of a downer at times, aesthetically. Castles also seem to have weird relationships with balconies and having areas where the first and second floors of the castle don’t align. On my second castle I built a balcony just to see what it was like but immediately decided to undo it, only for my first floor to insist that it wasn’t fully enclosed for the rest of that castle’s life before I moved to a new location again.
In many ways there’s a bunch of weird little ticks that V Rising has which feels like a game that either needs to be in early access a little more just to smooth out the UX or at least some understanding that not everyone has been in early access this whole time. There are tons of buffs and debuffs that the player can gain over the course of the game and none of them are ever explained until you take the time to open your menu and awkwardly select them yourself to read them. Part of this is probably because I was on a controller rather than mouse and keyboard (I hope mouse and keyboard solves this by having a mouse to highlight things) but that’s also a UI/UX failure that I hope PlayStation 5 players don’t have to deal with. V Rising is also very tight lipped about certain mechanics work, such as fishing or boss loot, and does a very poor job presenting that you unlocked new buildings or equipment outside of the first time you acquire them. That last one is mostly user error but I have to write down that I was a little tilted when I realized that I’d had the ability to make iron weapons for god knows how long but had missed that I unlocked that structure for a VERY long time. You’re also still weak to the sun when you’ve transformed into a wolf or a bear or a regular human, which is a bit odd. Especially as a human you’d think since you’re wrapped in thick robes you’d be immune to the sun entirely. But what do I know.
All that being said the weirdest and worst features in the game can be blamed on one fact, in my opinion: that the game was designed with PvP in mind. You don’t have to play PvP or even play with anyone (this entire review is based on me playing solo) but you’re still trapped with the baked-in mechanics that are designed for a game that you play with four or more other people. You can’t pause the game or speed up the in-game timer by sleeping in your tomb because that wouldn’t engage properly with other players. You have limited inventory and drawn out resource harvesting/production because you’re supposed to be competing with who knows how many other people and part of the “fun” is min-maxing everything to get a tight build that will out pace your competition. On a similar vein by default you can’t teleport to various parts of the map or even back home to your castle if you’re carrying certain premium crafting materials. Ostensibly so that you can’t cheese certain farming spots in PvP but again it has no use in PvE and fortunately can be turned off in server settings. You can only have three magic spells equipped at a time and (once again) your dodge is on an EIGHT SECOND COOLDOWN because if players could dodge forever they would and PvP fights would look like two wavedashers in Super Smash Bros Melee. This is a limitation I understand, but it is not one that I enjoy impacting my PvE experience. The game also has patches that are based entirely around how strong builds are in PvP, so players more focused on the PvE side may see their favorite builds impacted for no other reason than sweaty vampires on a completely different server were trolling casuals with them.
I should probably talk about the game’s story, such as it is, but there really isn’t much here to sink your teeth into (ha ha ha). Vampires used to rule the world, humans overthrew them, but now enough time has passed that you have risen from your exile to seek revenge on everyone that wronged your kind. As you start building your power you’ll be tasked to take out holders of the “V Blood,” denizens of the world that absorbed Dracula’s power after he died (both knowing and unknowing) and now hold power and knowledge that you can reclaim by killing them. Just don’t think too hard about how you need to kill someone to learn how to sew and get out there, vampy. These V Blood holders are the boss fights I was gushing about earlier and have suitably dramatic finishes where you absorb their blood in blasts of energy, but outside of some descriptions of the character and a few voice lines you rarely actually get to know anything about these bosses as you plow through them. They are not titanic personalities that you clash against on your quest for glory, they are all just yet another name on your list that you check off on your quest for absolute power. Some more powerful than others but they’re almost all more roadblocks than characters, much like how the story is basically just an introductory framework to justify your vampire fantasy rather than anything too engaging or memorable.
On balance I think the good of V Rising (the bosses, the magic spell variety that I didn’t really talk about, and the castle building that is engaging even for the creatively bankrupt) outweighs the bad (the PvP design decisions, the limited story, and the tech tree bottlenecks caused by the rare resource grind combined with the game’s leveling system). However, the bad will really stick out in the ebbs and flows of your journey like the sudden dips from crashes across the history of the Dow Jones, and if sudden spikes of frustration combined with crafting and building mechanics doesn’t sound appealing then V Rising most likely isn’t for you. That being said, that description would have turned me away and I didn’t hate the game, but I’m also a sucker for good/creative boss fights which V Rising has in droves. If you can forgive the bumps in the road I think it’s worth it for that alone, assuming you’re a fan of this kind of isometric combat.
