Steam Deck Playable!Welcome to my review of V Rising on the PC. This game is now available on PC (£29.50) and PlayStation 5 (£32.99). It is brought to us by Stunlock Studios who are known for a few free-to-play games including Battlerite Royale and Bloodline Champions.
V Rising is an isometric action role-playing survival game that lets you take control of a vampire, feast on foes, take on quests, and more. I believe this game is primarily meant to be played in co-op. However, I have been playing this solo with no friends/randoms to help me on the way and I have had tons of fun.
The Game
Upon starting a new game, you get to design yourself a vampire. You can choose from male and female, along with a pretty generous selection of other usual customisations such as hairstyles, skin colour, and hair colour.
Soon enough you will be feasting on various enemies and beasts before you know it. Whilst traversing the open world you’ll find a good variety of enemies to attack or avoid depending on how far you’ve travelled and how much you have levelled up.
The open world also has tons of different items for you to pick up for crafting and building when you’re ready to start building your castle, more on this below. Your inventory does have a limited number of slots for items so you will need to keep on top of this.
I find that the combat in-game is pretty fun. You can unlock a wide variety of skills and magic to use while fighting. Don’t worry too much if you choose the wrong spells or skills now as you can reset them later and then adjust to your liking if you don’t like something you’ve unlocked now.
There is a good arsenal of weapons that you can find, buy, or craft. These can also double up as tools for farming items from around the world. For example, you can place an axe in one of your many quick slots on the hot bar. When you have it equipped, it is more effective at chopping trees than a sword. A hammer works better against piles of stone and ore. You get the idea. As you get higher tiers of weapons and tools, they are more effective at their given task. The bone axe can start at say 25% effectiveness against trees, whilst a lumberjack axe is 50% effective.
Once you’ve built the aforementioned castle, you will be able to build a variety of storage chests ranging from small chests, to vampire chests, gem chests, and more. A great feature in the game is that when you are using a storage box or production station there is a green border around items in your inventory that are useful for that station or already in that chest.
For example, if you are using a sawmill, in your inventory it will highlight the wood that you have. This makes it easier to see the relevant items in your inventory for the station you’re working on. Kudos to Stunlock Studios for implementing this feature. This needs to be in more survival games!
So I mentioned production stations above… What are these? Well to put it simply, they are stations that help you craft new/better materials so you can build higher-tier items/stations in your castle. There is a grinder, chuck some stone into this and it will make stone bricks for you. This will assist you in making your castle into a proper castle and not just a wooden shack in the middle of a forest.
King (or queen!) of the Castle!
Starting your castle requires you to place a castle heart in an empty and unoccupied area of land. Be wise in your placement as you will need to expand the size of your castle later on. However, there is a structure you can build that will allow you to move your castle and its content in its entirety to a whole new area. Pretty neat idea.
One of the mechanics of V Rising that I enjoyed was the dynamic day and night cycle. You’ve got to be careful and keep an eye on the time of day. Otherwise, you’ll get caught out in the sun. However, should the sun rise whilst you’re out in the open, don’t worry as all is not lost. There’s an awesome feature whereby if you dodge into the shadows being cast, you will not take damage. Stay in the sun too long and you will take a massive amount of damage which drains your life very fast. Of course, dodge into the shadows and you will stop taking damage.
This is where your castle helps. The castle has, of course, an inside area. This means you are protected from sunlight at all times. That’s when you have proper castle walls all around your castle. If you have palisades (wooden walls), you won’t have a roof and you’ll have to hide in any shadow cast in your safe haven. The daytime is a good time for you to sleep and rest up. Or you can build upon your castle to make it mightier by the day.
To help you get stronger and unlock new items/recipes to craft/build, you will need to hunt down V Blood targets which are essentially boss fights. These are tougher targets which have greater rewards than a standard enemy. As mentioned, defeating one of these targets can also give you new items or recipes to craft. For example, you can place bones in the grinder to create an item called grave dust. You can only unlock this recipe by defeating a V Blood boss, and you sure as hell need this item to upgrade your castle.
It can be found around the world. But, of course, that’s not as easy as making it yourself in your castle.
Further into the game, you can also get yourself some servants. These servants can help you with tasks in your castle to make production a lot easier whilst you’re away from your lair.
V Rising has a very nice aesthetic to it and the graphics look pretty damn good. The game even looks good on the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally. It still gives pretty acceptable framerates of 40fps+ for me on a lower TDP setting. The sound effects and music help add to the creepy atmosphere of the game, especially when wearing a headset or earbuds.
Finally, I would like to add that the game works “out of the box” with 21:9 ultrawide monitors. It looks glorious in ultrawide too. The user interface scales nicely and fits along the sides of the display. Much better than just sitting in a weird place on your screen which some games have. You can see an example of this in my screenshot below.
Conclusions
V Rising is far better than I thought it was going to be. It gives me Diablo vibes but I find this a much more enjoyable game. I’ve never been a big fan of Diablo. However, V Rising offers some amazing graphics, fantastic sound effects, and gripping gameplay.
Whilst it doesn’t offer any real groundbreaking features in a survival game, it’s still a great game. It also has some new (to me at least) mechanics such as the green border around relevant inventory items and the sunlight damage unless in the shadows.
If you wish to check this game out for yourself you can visit the official Steam Store page. You can also check out our previous PC reviews.
I give V Rising a score of 9/10.
A code was kindly provided for us to review this.
