Already a hit on PC thanks to early access, V Rising will release on PS5 once version 1.0 arrives. This is an isometric action RPG similar to Diablo, but instead of focusing on loot, this blood-sucking adventure emphasizes crafting and building. It’s an enjoyable mix of genres, but it’s fair to say that the game struggles to show its true value until you spend hours and hours saving.
You awaken in a dusty ancient crypt, centuries after your kind was driven from the land of men, and you are a vampire tasked with re-establishing dominance over humanity. This means starting at the bottom of the food chain, gradually regaining your vampiric powers as you build your own castle and start terrorizing the locals.
But long before you can build a fortress fit for a vampire lord, you’ll have to fight your way through a lot of menial labor. Cutting down trees, smashing rocks: the usual busywork we associate with survival crafting titles. Even an undead tyrant has to start somewhere, we suppose, but at least V Rising gives you clear goals to strive for. Early on, the game does a good job of familiarizing you with the crafting system, pointing you to specific resources, and getting you to grips with the basics.
Once you have a base operational in a location of your choice, the real V Rising begins. The game takes place in a fairly large open world, and scattered across the map are more than 50 carriers of ‘V Blood’ – a particularly powerful type of the red stuff that, when consumed, is supposed to unlock your vampiric potential. These porters are essentially boss enemies, and ultimately you’re tasked with slaughtering them all.
However, you can’t just rush across the map and destroy everything and everyone from the start. Your combat skill is determined by the weapons and armor you have equipped, and so your progress is determined by the high level of your next opponent. Luckily, there’s a handy V Blood menu that lists all the bosses and their respective strengths, so you always know what you’re dealing with when it comes to raw stats.
To equip yourself with stronger gear, you’ll need to start crafting. And to improve your creations, you have to start building – and so V Rising’s gameplay loop reveals itself. You explore, you gather resources, you build, you create, you kill, and then the cycle repeats as you venture into increasingly dangerous areas.
Defeating bosses earns you skill points that you can use to learn spells from various schools of vampiric magic, and this is where character building comes into play. But in the beginning your options are quite limited, and as a result the battles can be quite monotonous. Again, it will take some time for V Rising to really open up in terms of gameplay potential – and less patient players power Don’t be put off by those early hours when it feels like you’re doing a lot of grinding for very little reward.
But if you can embrace that routine, the game turns out to be a very addictive adventure. Operating from the candlelit halls of your own castle and having devastating combat skills to call upon, V Rising is captivating, especially if you’re into the whole vampire aesthetic.
The boss fights also become more and more intense. There’s some great encounter design here, and things can get devilishly tricky if you’re not paying attention. Unique mechanics and movesets make most boss battles feel like an event, which is impressive when there are more than 50 of them to be found.
The combat as a whole is tough and largely satisfying. On PS5, your skill bar gives you access to an all-important dodge and two cooldown-based skills, as well as an ultimate attack that will be unlocked later. Each move is linked to a specific button, which is perfect, but the control scheme – which isn’t fully customizable at launch – becomes a bit complicated when additional weapon-based abilities are introduced.
Suddenly you’ll see slightly tricky button combinations for specific attacks, like holding L2 and pressing R1 – with both inputs already having their own uses outside of combat. As you spend more and more time playing, you’ll obviously become more familiar with the controls, but even halfway through the game we still had to actively think about where our fingers were going.
To make matters worse, actually aiming your ranged attacks feels awkward on a controller. You use the right stick to point your character towards his target, but the sensitivity is unnecessarily jittery, to the point where you can accidentally turn your anti-hero sideways. That’s not ideal in the heat of a difficult skirmish.
But these complaints aren’t deal breakers in the grand scheme of things. It’s very clear that V Rising was built as a PC release, and to be fair to developer Stunlock Studios, it’s done a good job of capturing everything on a controller. We’re sure post-launch updates will address many of these criticisms.
By the way, you can play V Rising online, both in co-op and competitively. The game is great as a solo experience, but teaming up with a few friends brings an interesting dynamic as you create a sort of vampire empire. Meanwhile, going against other players is intriguing for entirely different reasons. You’ll need to start thinking about protecting your castle from invaders, and possibly get ambushed while you’re at it. In reality, competitive play can quickly turn V Rising into a back-and-forth slog, but it’s a hardcore option for those who don’t mind the inevitable chaos.
Whether you’re playing alone or online, the first thing you need to do is set up your server – and here are some welcome settings to play with. For starters, you can adjust the game’s difficulty in impressive ways, by adjusting things like damage values. You can even make collecting resources less of a chore by increasing the yield of items across the board. For what it’s worth, we think these are the default values finebut we would totally understand if you want to avoid the routine as much as possible.