For the past few years, it feels like we’ve had a resurgence in survival games that twist the genre. Instead of focusing on tedious amounts of item gathering and meter management, a greater emphasis has been placed on doing something interesting, such as new mechanics. V Rising is the latest to really push the genre.

After just two years in Early Access on Steam, V Rising has finally hit 1.0 and with it, a wealth of new features, expanded maps, and reworked progression systems. I’ve put around thirty hours into V Rising over the course of the early access period and another fifty into the newly released 1.0 update. It’s been one hell of an adventure. 

There’s not a lot of story in place here. Instead, V Rising plays into the vampire fantasy of building up your own massive castle, tackling the dangers of the world, from Bandits and Vampire Hunters. This all leads toward taking down the daddy of all vampires: Dracula. There’s not a lot of story in the game itself, but if you really want to dig into it some flavour text and dialogue paint a picture that makes it feel a bit more thought out than it first seems.

As you work your way from the southernmost region, the world branches out. It’s filled with bandit camps, beasts, and all sorts of enemies. It’s a fun world to explore and has a surprising amount of variety, from basic camps and farmlands to giant castles, cathedrals, and laboratories. Farming areas often have large patrols and are covered in garlic to stave you off, whilst the sun never sets in the Hallowed Mountains some of the more dangerous creatures lurk here. Gloomwood though is my favourite of these areas, with mutated creatures and experimental machines. It’s a unique atmosphere and has one of the best map gimmicks I’ve ever experienced, but I won’t spoil it here.

Much like the excellent Dying Light franchise, V Rising makes clever use of the day/night cycle, but does something different with it. During the day you are vulnerable to the sunlight, and staying out for too long will cause you to burn up, dealing a devastating amount of damage, forcing you to dash to cover. Those moments where you are trying to get back to your base in the middle of the day, avoiding enemies and the daylight are some of the best. Dashing between shadows and hoping enemies don’t ambush you. It’s during the night when you are safe.

The first thing you’ll want to do is set up a temporary castle at one of the many pre-determined plots that scatter the map. This will start as something simple; a small incomplete base to store your resources and craft some basic gear. However, within a few hours, this will begin to grow until it eventually becomes a sprawling castle, with up to five floors, a garden area, and tons of rooms to do crafting, refinement, research, and rituals. V Rising lets you live out the Castlevania fantasy by giving you a lot of freedom to design your own castle and personalise it. 

Despite being a survival game at its very core, V Rising does not neglect great  ARPG gameplay. In fact, it’s quite the opposite as this game is an exceptional ARPG; rivaling that of Diablo IV mechanically. It’s fast, responsive, and surprisingly challenging. It’s less about dealing with endless hordes of enemies but rather about making the challenge about positions and dodging attacks. Even a few enemies in higher-level areas can be deadly if you go in unprepared.

With ten different weapon types to play around with. It feels fast, responsive, and addictive to play. You’ve got your standard array of swords, scythes, and slashers acting as your main melee weapon with their own abilities. There are also ranged options like bows and even pistols, combined with a lot of different skills. The ARPG action is fantastic.

Very soon you will realise every NPC has a rating with a job attached to them. By feeding on them you will gain access to the blood type that gives you a variety of buffs for certain actions, like physical damage or resource gathering, and the higher the percentage the more potent your abilities are. On top of this, if you manage to dominate an NPC and bring them back to your castle you can essentially turn them into an endless blood supply, or even as a servant to send out on missions to get massive amounts of resources, automating some of the resource gathering in the process.

A key part of progressing is levelling up your vampire and castle by taking out over fifty different bosses scattered around the world. Whilst some do fall into similar strategies with identical AoE or add-spam moments, for the most part, the bosses are excellent, with some very unique themes and settings to go alongside them. The bosses are also surprisingly challenging without being unfair. I wasn’t expecting boss fights to be one of my favourite elements here, especially when there are so many of them. They’re all surprisingly fun to fight.

Killing bosses will give you access to key recipes that can be used to refine different resources, open up crafting benches or just give you more structures to further customise your base, which can then be used to build better gear to upgrade your gear score and allow you to move to the next set of bosses. The progression path is really well thought out and it’s always clear where you need to go next, yet it still gives you the freedom of tackling whichever boss you want. Even if your gear score isn’t high enough you can attempt the boss anyway, there is nothing stopping you.

On top of this, many of the bosses will grant you some skills and abilities. Things like dominating humans to bring them back to your castle, turning into a werewolf to move around faster and avoid creature enemies act as permanent unlocks. However, it’s the skill system where things get interesting, especially with over fifty different skills. These can then be further modified by slotting gems into the skill. Whilst I believe the combat could benefit from being able to equip one more ability at a time, you can at the very least swap them out at any time, giving you full flexibility to try things out.

Crafting is a huge part of V Rising and has a lot of depth to it. Much of the resource refinement and crafting is based on real-time (assuming there’s a dedicated server). However, there’s also no shortage of things to do whilst waiting for crafting to complete. Go hunt down some bosses and gather some resources. It rarely feels problematic, especially on a dedicated server where you can simply log out and let the timers tick down. Thankfully, if you are only looking to play, you can just host your own lobby and mess around with dozens of modifiers to tweak the experience, including crafting times, starting levels, and resource gathering. For reviewing purposes and keeping the game close to the developer’s vision, I was playing with default PvE settings and nothing punishing.

As you build up your castle, you’ll realise just how brilliant the Quality of Life is. Marking items that you need in chests, while at the same time, having specific chests for the different types of loot. It makes inventory management and castle organisation so much easier, allowing you to focus on the good stuff, like building up the castle itself and going out on hunts. V Rising actively cuts down on some of the more tedious elements of a survival game. If you want to completely reorganise your castle or even move the entire thing from one plot to another, you can do that with ease.

Whilst the game is surprisingly an excellent solo experience with tons to do, it’s at its very best in cooperative play. Getting a few friends together to group up and take out world bosses is tons of fun. Better yet, progression can be separated with everyone building their own castles and progressing at their own pace, grouping up for world events or boss fights. Most of my playtime was on a PvE Dedicated Server for myself and a few friends to jump in and out of at any time. For those who like games like Rust, there are PvP servers as well. I don’t care much for that style of gameplay, so I didn’t delve too much into it, but there are always servers running for this.

As a whole, there’s a lot to dig into with V Rising and it’s well worth your time. The crafting, base building, micromanagement and fantastic ARPG mechanics all mesh together perfectly to give one of the most satisfying and addictive gameplay loops this year. And just when you think you’ve discovered everything, it will throw more at you. I haven’t gone over everything here. It has just enough survival elements to keep things interesting whilst giving a powerful sense of progression. All of this is on top of a great solo and multiplayer experience that truly allows you to play exactly how you want to.

Early on in the game, the visuals won’t blow you away with some pretty basic designs and some rough spots in general. Lower-quality textures can stand out. However, the more you play the more varied the game becomes, with each biome having a completely different look and feel. In the end, the art style is simple, yet effective.

This is the same for the sound design as well. Nothing stands out too much, but the soundtrack generally does a great job fitting into each environment. There’s not an awful lot of voice acting other than flavoured one-liners, but what is there is generally really good, especially with boss fights mocking you as the fights progress.

V Rising is not only an exceptional survival game but a great ARPG as well. With great combat, boss design mixed in with a healthy dose of well-balanced and meaningful survival crafting systems that make progression fun. This makes for a uniquely engaging experience that lets you live out the ultimate vampire fantasy.

 

Graphics: 8.5 A simple yet effective art style with a lot of variety let down by some rough edges.	Gameplay: 9.5 Strong core ARPG gameplay with a healthy dose of survival mechanics.
Sound: 8.5 Its solid soundtrack sets the stage for a gothic horror vampire adventure.	Fun Factor: 10 V Rising sets a new bar for the survival genre.
Final Verdict: 9.5

V Rising is available now on PC and PlayStation 5.

Reviewed on PC with an RTX 4070.

A copy of V Rising was provided by the publisher.