V Rising [Review]
V Rising lets you conquer a kingdom as a vampire.
V Rising. Credit: Stunlock Studios
You are a weakened vampire, waking up in a world now ruled by humans. You need to venture out, rebuild your castle, and gain strength to become the next Dracula. Stunlock Studios’ V Rising, now out of Early Access, is an open world survival game, with the twist being that it’s about vampires. It’s great in both respects.
Since falling in love with Subnautica, I’ve been on a quest to find another crafting survival game that I would enjoy as much. V Rising melds the base building mechanics of that game with combat mechanics similar to games like Dysmantle. It all exists within a mysterious fantasy realm full of dangerous creatures.
V Rising. Credit: Stunlock Studios
Being a vampire, you must contend with daylight. It won’t instantly reduce you to ash, but you’ve only got a few seconds before you start taking massive damage if you’ve got no resistance. Daytime gives you an opportunity to manage your resources and craft items in your castle, which starts as open-roofed courtyards walled in by wooden palisades before you gain the ability to build stone walls. You fill it with standard crafting stations, like a foundry, a tannery, or a workshop table, but then you also get fun vampire fixtures like a blood press or vermin farm.
I appreciated that the game gave me clear goals for early advancement, in order to learn crucial recipes and the core survival mechanics. Without that onboarding experience structure, I could see myself getting lost and frustrated since after getting into the world, I could basically go anywhere, as far as my wimpy gear would let me survive. As far as tutorials go, it’s fairly hands-off, but offers just enough guidance.
V Rising. Credit: Stunlock Studios
Combat reminded me a little bit of games like World of Warcraft—real time with active ability cooldowns. You don’t autoattack, but you’re held back by the timers on all abilities, including defensive tools like counters. With the controller, you can assign weapons and items to up to eight slots, accessible via short or long presses on the d-pad’s directions. It was nice to be able to swap instantly between different weapon types, since each has strengths, weaknesses, and unique specials. I appreciated that weight wasn’t a consideration in equipment and combat performance.
As of the 1.0 release, the game works fantastically with a controller, with the exception of a strange Steam Deck issue that prevents the left trigger from working on external controllers. Thankfully, there’s a workaround that fixes the issue, swapping controller order in Steam so the external controller is second. The game performs well on Steam Deck as long as you keep it in native resolution and don’t expect to max out your settings.
V Rising. Credit: Stunlock Studios
I’m not very fond of PvP in games so I haven’t experimented with that side of V Rising. However, I can report that PvE co-op is a blast. The game is great when playing alone and it’s even better playing with friends.
I was originally going to wait for the PlayStation 5 release, but when the opportunity arose to play V Rising on Steam Deck, I couldn’t resist. I’ve now spent around 15 hours with the game and I’m looking forward to playing much more and getting that Castlevania DLC.
V Rising is available now on Steam for PC. It will be released on PS5 on June 11, 2024.
Overall Score: 9/10
Played on: Steam Deck
