Have you ever yearned to embody a true Vampire—one who raids, pillages, and siphons blood? Do you dream of wielding unholy magic and constructing a colossal castle for all to behold? Then this game is for you.
V Rising aims to fulfill that very fantasy. But remember, while Vampires might possess an immortal lifespan, they are not unkillable. The faster you grasp this truth, the quicker you will thrive in this very hostile world.
Let's dive right in!
Story
Vampires used to rule the lands under The Great Lord Dracula himself. However, the humans rose up against them and won with the power of light that the Church of Luminance wielded. Vampires had to go into hiding and sleep for several centuries with an unbearable thirst. Now we awaken, and our hunt begins again.
You start out as a no-name vampire that wakes up and realizes that you're not under Dracula's influence anymore. This means it's time for YOU TO RISE UP as the new Vampire Lord (hence the name).
The game's story is mostly told by exploring the overworld and in the backstories of each boss you take down. It gives you a good setup, and then it's mostly up to you, the player, to make your own story as you explore this vast world yourself or with your friends.
Gameplay
V Rising claims to be an open-world crafting survival action game, but in my opinion, it focuses a lot more on the action and crafting parts of the genre.
The game starts with you waking up in a crypt and learning how to fight, survive, and craft your first weapon. You have a primary attack, a dash, and two starting spells: a simple projectile and a counter-attack. After eating a rat to replenish your "Blood pool" (more on this in a bit), you're thrust out into the open world via two different entry points and then told to start exploring.
To give you a bit of guidance, the game has a helpful tutorial on the upper-left part of the screen that tells you what you should focus on at the moment. Clearing these objectives unlocks more of the game for you, such as new gear to craft and eventually how to set up and maintain your own massive vampire castle.
V Rising doesn't have a traditional "level up" system. You only gain real power by making better gear that increases your gear level. Think more along the lines of Monster Hunter, but your targets tend to be more human than monsters most of the time.
As soon as you've geared yourself up with some armor and better weapons, you're directed to open the "V-blood" menu. In this menu, you'll see several bosses listed and notice that they will reward you with new powers or technology if you take them down. After tracking down your first V-Blood boss, which is a great wolf, and taking it down, you gain the power to transform into a wolf for greater mobility.
This is the main gameplay loop of V Rising: prep, gather/farm materials to gear up, then fight the next set of bosses to gain new powers such as spells or new technologies. In between all of this, you build up a big, fancy vampire castle with all the new tech unlocked and maintain the Castle Heart (more on this later).
V Rising is a huge game with a lot of mechanics that work in a wonderful symphony with each other, so I will split the gameplay part of this review into different sections to make it easier to digest.
Combat
V Rising, which I'll call VR from here on out, is a top-down isometric game. While its perspective might suggest a fast-paced, hack-and-slash experience akin to Diablo or Path of Exile, that's not the case. VR takes a more methodical and slower approach to combat. Most, if not all, attacks are skill-based, requiring you to aim them. Your dash has a cooldown, preventing it from being spammed for dodging every attack, and unlike the examples mentioned, you have full camera control.This might sound a bit limiting compared to its contemporaries, but it creates a very satisfying combat system. It rewards skillful play, proper understanding of boss patterns, and keen situation recognition. The game doesn't hold your hand and will punish any mistakes made.
As a vampire, you have several ways to dominate your foes and diverse builds to fit specific playstyles. Perhaps you fancy a more up-close and personal approach with a heavier focus on melee combat; there are spells that boost physical abilities and a counter. Or, you might prefer a more mage-like approach, selecting a ranged weapon as your main tool while your spells are much more destructive in nature.
Alternatively, there's a support style where you curse enemies to weaken them and heal your allies, or my preferred playstyle: summoning skeletons and minions to overwhelm and distract the enemy. All of these can be combined in many different ways; there's no right or wrong way to play. The 13 different weapons in the game, each with unique abilities, also significantly affect your playstyle choice, as any of them can fit any approach.
What truly impacts your playstyle is the blood pool you're currently using. While exploring the world, you'll encounter all sorts of humans and creatures with different blood types and qualities. The higher the blood's percentage, the better its buffs will be. For example, the Rogue blood type focuses on faster dash cooldowns and quicker weapon attack speeds, while the Scholar blood type focuses on increasing magic powers.
Testing out each blood type and finding the ones you like in any given situation is paramount to becoming a successful Vampire Lord!
The bosses roam freely in the open world, and some are deliberately out of your league! One, in particular, you might recognize as a famous hunter from The Castlevania series: Simon Belmont himself is out there hunting you! VR had a collaboration with the franchise... I could never have imagined how scary Simon Belmont's main theme could be when you're the target of it; it truly creates a "why do I hear boss music?" moment.
But there are ways to sneak around these hunters or even use them to your benefit! Not all enemies are united; opposing factions will fight each other openly if they cross paths. As a Vampire Lord in the making, why dirty your own hands when there's eager, free labor to exploit?
There are three difficulties to select from: the typical easy for more relaxed adventuring and building, normal for a balanced experience, and hard mode for veterans looking for a challenge.
You can either join a public server that is either PVE (player versus environment) or PVP (player versus player), or make your own private server (which is what I did for this review).
Castle Management & Crafting
In between hunting for bosses and farming materials, you get a good break maintaining your castle and its heart. As enemies are killed, they drop "blood essence," which is used for various crafting recipes but primarily to keep the Castle Heart fed. This essence ensures that your castle won't crumble. This mechanic is designed more for dedicated PvP servers than for private or PvE servers, preventing players from "hogging" a spot on the map indefinitely with their castle unless they are actively playing the game.
I played most of this game on a private server, so the timer only went down while I was playing, not when I was offline (thankfully). There are many different crafting stations you unlock over time. You either craft directly with them or place items in them to be refined into other crafting materials—for example, wood becoming planks in a sawmill, and stone becoming stone bricks in a grinder.
These processes take time and are usually something you leave running while you go out to farm more materials or do something entirely different. It can feel a bit time-consuming to just wait for items to be done, but a smart Vampire Lord always knows how to use their time efficiently! (Unless you're me and seriously wanted that weapon upgrade before doing anything else, so I just waited the full 5 minutes).
Primarily, you'll want to gather a lot of wood and stone to start building your castle. The castle requires floors and walls to become enclosed, which in turn automatically builds a roof to protect you from the sun's rays during the day. The tutorial will teach you about creating specific rooms for different workshops so that crafting tables and refineries gain bonuses and increased speeds. Proper building layout matters in the game. Of course, as a solo player with limited room, I personally put them all nicely into a corner of my castle... I never claimed to be the most organized Vampire Lord, haha.
I found the building system surprisingly responsive and well-made compared to most similar systems from other survival crafting games. It was smart enough to know if I wanted to make small adjustments to the building and gave me heads-ups on exactly what was blocking it. If I made mistakes, I could readjust easily or fully refund anything I built.
You can even build monster spawners to set up trap rooms (more for PvP) or to kill specific enemies for drops. This is truly one of the better crafting and building systems out there and makes for a really good change of pace from the intense action. Plus, who knew a Vampire Lord's castle could become so cozy with the different themes and very chill soundtrack that accompanies it?
Exploring
As I stated earlier, there are good reasons to explore the world to know where to find certain materials and where all the V-blood bosses usually hang out. Vampires have one more unique thing to keep tabs on, though: whenever the sun rises.
Compared to the traditional tale of vampires instantly turning to dust just by being touched by any sunlight, in V Rising, it takes a bit of buildup and exposure for you to start burning. That doesn't mean it's impossible to be out during the day. Clouds form moving shadows on the ground, and going behind a tree for shade also works for avoiding the infernal sun's light.
With this dynamic system, it becomes rather intense to be out and about during the day, particularly if you get caught in fights. While there are ways to mitigate the sun, as a child of the night, you never gain true immunity to it.
Because of the open-world structure, you're free to go anywhere in the world at any time! The catch is that each major area is divided by gear difficulty. So, yes, in theory, you could go to the last areas of the game immediately and get some of the later items... if you can survive, that is. Plus, you can't really do much with the later area items until you've unlocked the recipes, so it's heavily incentivized to follow the V-blood system's progression.
To me, this actually made the open world a lot more structured and streamlined. The full open map may look daunting at first, but V Rising gives you just enough guidance so you don't get overwhelmed. As you improve and learn, the map will become easy to navigate and understand.
Pros and Cons
As someone who enjoys open-world survival crafters and has played a variety of them (Valheim, The Forest, Grounded, Terraria, etc.), V Rising (VR) felt like a truly fresh take on the genre. At first glance, I expected a Diablo or Path of Exile-style hack-and-slash experience, but I was delightfully surprised that the game adopted a slower, more methodical, and meaningful approach to both combat and exploration.
That's not to say there aren't ways to speed up the game later on, but by then, it feels fully earned and a rewarding progression for the player. In fact, the biggest pro I can give this game is its amazing pacing. You consistently find yourself gearing up and fighting tougher, unique bosses. Even if some share similar powers or themes, they never feel like a repeat, always keeping you on your toes.
Every time I thought I was getting good and becoming cocky, the game threw a new curveball, whether with a new type of boss or with new enemies and area gimmicks, fully humbling me! Simon Belmont was a consistently scary boss to see walking around, even in the starting areas! However, once you were ready to take him on, it was an amazing fight where he didn't hold back, forcing you to use everything you had learned up to that point.
The well-placed breaks for working on your castle further highlight the game's excellent pacing, even in single-player. The best part is that you can adjust the pacing in private servers to fit your playstyle or schedule. Is farming taking too long? Increase the drop rate of regular items a bit (though I don't recommend increasing it too much, as it can detract from the pacing). Remove teleporter restrictions so you can teleport with any items in your inventory (highly recommended for private servers or single-player). You can even adjust whether gear has any durability at all.
For this review, I played through the game mostly solo on a private server with normal difficulty and default settings to get the "intended" experience. However, VR has much more to offer. There's a whole PvP setup, as I alluded to earlier, with servers that reset progression every few months. You can attack other players' castles and even destroy them, creating an experience similar to Rust, another open-world survival crafting game that focuses entirely on PvP.
I'm not a big fan of these types of PvP experiences, so I can't honestly verify how good or bad this aspect of the game is. I mostly wanted to focus on the game itself and its main mechanics rather than the community experience. That said, it does add a whole different layer, and I'm glad that you have the choice to play on a PvE-focused server or privately instead. As a new Vampire Lord, I'm not keen on fighting my own kind, after all.
If I had to list some cons for the experience, it would be that the middle section of the game introduces "rift events." The idea behind these is to fight waves of enemies to spawn a previously defeated boss, allowing you to get new crafting materials and potentially cool weapons. It's also a way to encourage players to frequent the area for both PvE and PvP potential. The issue is that they are real-time based and have a set rotation for when they occur.
You can adjust how frequent they are in the server settings, but even at the lowest settings, it takes a good half hour for one to start. I understand the idea behind them for a multiplayer server, but for private games, and in my case, solo play, I would have preferred a way to manually activate them whenever I wanted, perhaps with a material cost.
Some of the grinding in the default settings is a bit more time-consuming than I initially thought. It costs quite a lot of stone bricks and planks to build a proper castle, so early on, you will be hitting those trees and stones for far longer than you probably want to. While in the endgame, some recipes become a tiny bit ridiculous with the material cost to craft the items you want.
Of course, this is if you play with default settings. The beauty of this game is that, again, you can fully adjust all of these settings to fit how much time you can put into the game. Just be careful of how easily you can destroy the balance by changing them around too much.
Closing thoughts
V Rising is an intense but very enjoyable experience that truly delivers on the fantasy of being a Vampire, embracing both the good and the bad that comes with it (like the infernal sun!). Personally, I believe this is not only a great solo game but definitely an amazing multiplayer experience with friends. With how easy it is to customize your gameplay—even after a playthrough has started—it never feels like you're wasting your time.
I warmly recommend this game and consider it an essential experience, particularly if you've been looking for a Vampire game.
It has never felt this good to be a child of the night!
VERDICT: Essential
Reviewed on PC
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