V Rising took us completely by surprise. The MMO-survival-role-playing mix is virtually finished and offers hours of vampire fun without a second of boredom.
In our in-house dungeon, the screams of our prisoners resound, which we keep as a handy blood bank. Meanwhile, we are on our way to the neighbouring village to select new members for our servants. Because we have already terrorised the people there, they are now growing garlic to protect themselves. Quite weakened and with a freshly infatuated worker in tow, we retire to our vampire castle at dawn and take a rest in our coffin. And another night in Valdoran is over.
As ancient vampires who have awoken from a centuries-long sleep, we make the area unsafe in the MMORPG survival mix V Rising. Already during character creation it becomes clear: in V Rising everything is really under the sign of the much-sung-about blood connoisseurs.
Whoever thinks that the vampire genre has been pretty much sucked dry in terms of games is wrong. Rarely has a game made so much of the fabled palefaces and taken us into gothic worlds as immersively as V Rising. We’ll put it in vampiric terms: Once you’ve taken a liking to V Rising’s blood, you’re not going to get away from it any time soon. Instead, he spends night after night hunting, as a castle architect, gathering resources, slaying nuns and priests, or in the depths of an eerie spider cave.
We’ll be honest: At first glance, V Rising looks a bit daunting. The game graphics are quite old-fashioned, there is no story at all, and on top of that, the game is only available in an Early Access version. However, if you give the game a chance, you will quickly throw all your worries overboard. V Rising is almost bug-free, it offers over 40 hours of gameplay and has a flair from here to Transylvania.
Table of Contents
Vampires are bloodthirsty
The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. So it’s no wonder that a crucial factor in our fascination with V Rising is the blood system. After waking up from our coffin for the first time and going through a small but fine tutorial, fresh blood is at the top of our list of necessary errands. So we tap a tired deer and drink it dry, that’s all we can manage for now. We let out a little “yummy”. Did we really just call deer blood delicious?
This will happen to us quite often in the course of the game, because as befits a survival game, the gnawing thirst for blood is a constant in the course of the game. Often such hunger systems are annoying – but not in V Rising. There are different types and qualities of blood, and depending on what we want to do, different types are more worthwhile than others. High-quality deer blood, for example, makes us faster, other types give us weapon strength or critical hit chance. Good blood also looks better, and so we quickly develop an aversion to rat blood (yuck!) or other cheap alternatives.
As befits vampires, we stalk through the forests and villages, always on the lookout for better blood, and because we benefit playfully from it, we are terribly motivated to find the most delicious (we mean, of course: the most practical) blood. We also notice: the vampire feeling comes across slowly because the blood mechanic captures the core of vampirism so brilliantly. As time goes by, the scruples fall more and more until we lick our bloody lips uninhibitedly and pleasurably.
Vampires hate the sun
The second constant besides our thirst for blood is our aversion to the sun. At night we can move freely and carefree, but as soon as day breaks, we better get to safety. It takes about five seconds before we are burnt in the sun and dead as a doornail.
So during the day we scurry from shade to shade on our way to our sun-protected home, because fortunately we are safe there. Regularly it gets quite dicey, because the shadows move fast (almost too fast) and if you look too long into the map or the inventory, you’ll be burnt to a crisp. More variance in the weather would have been nice here, for example, allowing us a rainy day.
Nevertheless, the vampire spark spills over again, because the game forces us to behave vampirically. We can turn human later in the game, but even then we are bound to the shadows and at our core we remain the evil vampire villain that we are.
Thankfully, the days are much shorter than the nights and two-thirds of the time we spend under pleasantly UV-free moonlight. We don’t need to fear the dark either: Nights we are moody and gloomy, but still sufficiently lit. We have never been annoyed by being condemned to permanent night shift by our vampire identity.
Besides the sun, we have a few other weaknesses that are not new to the well-read vampire fan: Garlic, Silver, Fire and Sanctity. If we have silver coins, which we can use to buy items from merchants, in our inventory, our self-healing powers are inhibited. Garlic, which some villages grow for protection, weakens us more and more the longer we stay within its radius. On the one hand, V Rising reinvents little, relying instead on established ideas. On the other hand, these ideas are so inventively and skillfully implemented that we don’t want to complain.
Vampires are pretty goth
At night we are mostly out and about causing trouble somewhere. The days we spend peacefully and innocently in our dwelling (except perhaps for our blood bank prison). At the beginning we enclose it with modest palisade walls, but soon we erect a huge vampire castle in Gothic style. Starting from our central “Castle Heart”, we build room by room with high black walls, gloomy corridors and atmospheric decorative elements such as vases, busts and statues.
The building mode is gratefully clear and not at all fiddly. In no time at all, we have the first rooms out of the ground and can start decorating them. Because the decorations fit perfectly into the gloomy vampire setting, it’s a lot of fun and motivates even notorious tree-huggers.
Without any problems we fill day after day with the construction of our castle and the sun can’t harm our game fun. Then we return from the next nightly foray with new resources with which we further decorate our tomb. This creates a nice rhythm without idle time.
Our castle serves not only aesthetic but also practical purposes. Starting with an extensive crafting system that lets us sink into the typical Diablo spiral, we melt metals, weave cloth and tan leather in countless workshops in order to craft better and better equipment. With better equipment, we then unlock access to stronger bosses.
Besides this already quite motivating spiral, we regularly unlock special objects that make us the ultimate vampire lord: In servant coffins, we transform innocent humans into vampire servants that we send on resource hunts from our giant throne. Soon we turn into all kinds of animals and roam the countryside as wolves or bears. V Rising almost throws atmospheric gameplay elements at us and we can’t help but feel like the most powerful vampire of them all.
Vampires are supernaturally strong
When we’re not robbing poor creatures of their blood, we’re probably hunting one of the many final bosses. We need them for their special blood, which unlocks new items and abilities.
In a system reminiscent of the Witcher Sense from The Witcher 3 – but much more annoying to use – we pick up the scent of our prey and set off in search of it. Some bosses we find on the open road (like the dreaded vampire hunter Tristan), others are hiding in villages and caves, through which we first have to fight our way.
In battle, we choose between various weapons and spells. Each weapon has its own special abilities and there are many different combinations, which we all try out until we find our favourite.
In the end, we decide on a large scythe and a healing spell with which we mow our way through the masses of enemies. Battles vary in difficulty depending on the area; we are most afraid of torchbearers and the painful blasts of fire they throw at us.
Once we make it to a boss, the battles become truly epic. Like the bosses themselves, their fighting styles couldn’t be more different. From a necromancer who sends skeletons after us, to a quarry commander who fires dynamite at us, to a geomancer who turns into a gigantic stone golem without further ado, everything is there.
At best, we coordinate our strategies and skills with our co-op partners to maximise our chances of victory. Because some fights can get tricky and when day breaks in the middle of them, we get into sunny trouble.
Sometimes V Rising even has a bit of humour: boss opponent Beatrice, a dressmaker, is a nice old lady who doesn’t even fight us, but just runs away in panic. Because we still have to relieve her of her blood for the purpose of unlocking, we realise what nasty vampire drudges we have become. Yummy.
Vampires keep to themselves
The fights don’t play very well on their own. Because many bosses summon additional minions, the enemy masses quickly become overwhelming and frustrating. As an MMO game, however, V Rising is not really designed for solo play anyway.
In clans of up to four people, we can tackle bosses together. But when four of us are on the road, it almost becomes too easy. Here, V Rising could design the bosses a little better for different group sizes so that the game experiences don’t differ so much.
The game is played online in various modes that allow PvP or not. Even in PvE mode, you can easily spend over 40 hours, so even PvP haters will get their money’s worth. In general, V Rising is not the most interactive MMO in comparison, and sometimes we almost forgot that there are other groups on our server.
This is also due to the exciting game world, which keeps us busy throughout without any problems. In the first area, a forest full of riffraff, we fight our way through the intrigues of the various bandit camps. Because wild animals and undead also dwell in the same forest, we are not the only ones who provoke fights. The different factions also fight each other and if we are lucky, we observe them doing so and collect the resources of the deceased losers afterwards.
Apart from this forest, there is also a neater village called Dunley, where the much too holy priests give us a hard time, and a cursed creepy forest as well as an ultra-safe mountain bastion.
As we level up, the enemies become stronger and more organised, so there’s a definite sense of progression when we venture into a Dunley monastery for the first time, for example. Sure, a bit more framing story would be nice, but the game world offers plenty of tie-ins to feel connected even without a story, and somehow the lack of dialogue is also refreshing.
Vampires, vampires, vampires
Overall, V Rising balances a variety of genres and moods with impressive skill. Simultaneously survival, MMORPG and action, at times dark and eerie, at times serene and social, V Rising finds a common denominator that holds the game together: vampirism.
Every detail, from the paintings in our castle to the hairstyles in character creation, is inspired by the vampire setting. This consistency works and we happily mix genres because the resulting (blood) cocktail just tastes so delicious. Rarely have we been able to put ourselves in the shoes of such a nasty vampire character so successfully. If this is supposed to be just the Early Access version (although the game in general seems very finished), we are curious to see what else is to come until the final release in twelve months.
(V Rising will be available to buy on (Steam)
from 17 May 2022.
Preliminary Score Box.
Editorial conclusion
Quite honestly? I had no expectations whatsoever for V Rising. In an interview, the developers told me that it was a genre mix of open world, Diablo-like combat, base building and survival. But a clear picture of the game still didn’t want to form. “It’s bound to be another 0815 game with a vampire stamp on it. They’re just jumping on the survival trend!”, I thought. But holy garlic! I didn’t expect V Rising to surprise me so positively.
The survival game is not only incredibly diverse and extraordinary. You can also tell at every turn that the vampires were at the forefront of the developers’ minds and that they have thought through every game mechanic and tailored it to the bloodsuckers. I was particularly taken with the unique blood system. Base building is also incredibly fun. For in addition to conventional things like workbenches and kilns, we can also build our own graveyards for resource farming or coal basins that cast shadows, for example.
But a little criticism is also necessary: Currently, the shadows move incredibly fast, so that moving around during the day is a real pain. In addition, the difficulty of the bosses varies greatly, which could lead to problems if you want to prove yourself as a lone vampire. But otherwise, V Rising already feels incredibly rounded in Early Access and is a lot of fun, especially in a group. I’m curious to see what else there is to discover and what the developers will work on until the release. But V Rising is already an absolute recommendation!
