V Rising

What a trip. Over 100 hours of vampire energy. It was deliciously tortured. TL;DR? Yeah, fun game. Buy it. ILL,LMR: I bought this on a deep sale and it sat in the pile for a long time. Much like the plot of V Rising itself, the game was resurrected from the depths of my backlog to rise as.. this game I played a lot of. I've played many games over many decades. I also knocked about with Vampire LARPers in the 90s (it was cool, they LARPed all over downtown) and learned a surprisingly large amount of White Wolf vamp knowledge from those kids back then. I also enjoyed the hell out of games like Neverwinter Nights and other isometric combat games like that. So, given that V Rising has done a fantastic job of covering so many aspects of Vamp 'gameplay' it's no surprise I stuck around for as long as I did with this one. When I started the game I had little expectations. What actually transpires (and V Rising does a very good job of it) is the player will grow their little powerless rat-munching vamp into one more powerful than Dracula itself, and you'll experience every step of power creep along the way. Overall, this translates to the overarching and empirical objective: Grow in Power Rating. It's a number comprised primarily of your attack and defensive stats, which is comprised of your weapons, armor and spell power ratings. You'll start at power level 1 or so, and in order to beat Dracula you're going to have to get that up to over 90. Getting from that start to that endpoint involves a lot of combat, crafting, base building, and exploration. I'll touch on each point briefly here, otherwise this'll get too wordy. 1) Combat: V Rising (VR) appears, to me, to have an isometric style combat that has learned a lot from, and plays similarly to, many other action games of its kind. Everything scales in VR, including the themes around combat and attack offerings, weapons, and spells. Each of those individual components come with their own sort of skill tree, which means that each will grow in power as the game progresses. A huge part of this game is beating bosses, and upon beating those bosses, drinking their blood and acquiring their powers. So combat is not just inflicting terror on citizens and monsters to get their stuff, but also, and more importantly, finding and beating the bosses of each subarea so that you can improve various aspects of your power. 2) Crafting: As mentioned, in order to grow in power in VR, you're going to require increasingly better armor, weapons, spells, and more. In order to achieve those improvements the player will need to find the items required for assembly, the 'blueprints' to make the thing, and the tool required to do so. 3) Base Building: A fun and essential component to VR. You'll need this base to improve everything, and it's also the place to house your thralls that you capture. It's not perfect, but it's pretty damn close to a Sims 4 experience with a Vampire tileset. 4) Exploration: The map is quite large, feels large, and transportation will vary as VR progresses. Each section of difficulty presents itself and plays like a biome in any other game, so you'll have a clear distinction when you're 'not in Kansas anymore'. Oftentimes a change of biome means a complete change in combat tactics and considerations, so it's not just about 'tougher enemies' but also a slow, creeping introduction of more complex challenges to overcome, both strategically and tactically. So it's a good game. But as I said up front, it was a tortured experience - which I felt thematically acceptable. It's like, I'm always striving for more power. It's never enough. Every successful harvest of souls leaves me yearning for more power, the next kill, and that feels extremely on-brand for a vampire. There's a ton of other things worth mentioning here - like the capturing of prisoners, the power of varying blood qualities and using them to your advantage, building up your horse, transforming in to different creatures so as to improve travel time and access previously unattainable areas, and more. It's absolutely worth mentioning that I played this exclusively on controller. I have been K&M almost exclusively since the early 90s, but nowadays I just like to chill with controllers for some reason. So everything I've done here I've done from a relaxed gaming position, playing with a controller. I haven't played this in a few weeks but I've mastered the game well enough for my liking. I have to go back and beat Dracula but that's just a matter of red tape; I have the tools, I just can't be asked with the challenge of 'ol Drac right now. The game is over 24 months past V.1 release at this point and it's got a lot of DLC on offer. It looks to me like the DLC is just for aesthetics. Which is cool. Before I go, here's some things. 1. No, I didn't play multiplayer. No comments there. 2. No technical issues at all. 3. Generally, if I have played something for 100 hours it means it's good in my books. I don't have much interest or time these days in playing games that suck. V Rising is a good one for vamp champs and old dorks like me. Grab it on sale, because it will be eventually, and then play it when you want to.

I’ve put 181 hours into V Rising, which is honestly something I normally don’t do. I usually get bored with games long before I put anywhere near that many hours into them, so that probably says a lot about how much I enjoyed this one. V Rising is a nice mix of a survival game, ARPG, and base-building game. You play as a vampire, explore the world, collect resources, build and upgrade your castle, craft better gear, and take on bosses to unlock new abilities and progression. The combat feels a lot like an action RPG, with different weapons and vampire abilities that let you build your character in different ways. What I really like is that there’s always something to work toward. You’re constantly unlocking new abilities, better equipment, castle upgrades, or another boss you want to take down. The castle building is also surprisingly addictive – although you do need to like world building for this. There’s some grinding involved, and traveling around the map can get a little repetitive, but it never bothered me enough to stop playing. If you like games like Diablo, Valheim, or other survival/building games, I’d definitely recommend giving V Rising a shot

One of my favorite games of all time. Amazing solo. Fantastic with friends. Enemies are diverse, engaging, and rewarding to defeat. Victory feels earned. The grind to unlock and upgrade gear and abilities is satisfying. Building your vampiric lair is sublime. The breadth of customization including server configs, mods, wipes, etc. make it extremely replayable. 10/10