V Rising Reviews

🩸 V Rising Review – Rise, Craft, Bite, Repeat! V Rising is the kind of game that quietly sinks its fangs into you—and before you know it, you're 12 hours deep and calling your Castle Heart "home." Whether you're a solo stalker of the night or building a vampire clan with friends, this game knows how to make undead life feel alive. 🧭 Questing: Easy, Breezy, Bloody Fun The quests in V Rising are smooth and intuitive, guiding you through progression without feeling like a tutorial on repeat. They’re easy enough to keep the pace going, but engaging enough to not feel like filler. Every objective has purpose, and most of the time you’re already doing what it asks just by playing the game. 🛠 Crafting: Simple, Satisfying, Zero Headache Crafting in V Rising is refreshingly straightforward. Place the station, slap in the resources, and boom—you're making gear, bricks, and blood potions like a vampire Gordon Ramsay. Everything is logically laid out, and stations upgrade organically as you grow. 🏰 Castle Life: Beautifully Bare... Literally One thing that might throw new players off is the inability to place a traditional roof—but hear me out: that’s where mist braziers come in. These lil’ lifesavers create protective shadows during the day, letting you live that open-concept vampire fantasy. Just make sure to place them smartly or risk going crispy. 👾 Mob Diversity & Resource Hunt The world is crawling with beautifully varied enemies. From werewolves to treant hulks to spellcasting humans—you’ll never feel like you're fighting the same thing over and over. Add in a satisfying materials hunt, and you’ve got a grind that actually feels worth it. 🌞 Sun-Up, Sun-Down: Love It The day/night cycle adds a chef’s kiss layer of tension and rhythm. You learn to plan your travel and fights around it—and when that sun creeps up unexpectedly mid-fight, oof, it’s panic in the best way. 🧛 Character Creation: Simple But Sweet No, you won’t find sliders for every eyelash and earlobe here, but the character creator does its job. It’s basic, yes—but sometimes you don’t need bells and whistles when you’re already dripping in gothic cool. TL;DR: V Rising is a stylish, immersive vampire survival game that hits the sweet spot between casual and hardcore. Crafting is a breeze, quests are enjoyable, and the sunlit stakes are real. The lack of roofs? Eh—just another excuse to place more mist braziers. Rating: 9/10 – Suck it (up), it’s that good.

I wanted to like V Rising, unfortunately it is just not the kind of game I thought it was. To anyone mistaking this for an ARPG similar to Diablo, Grim Dawn, or Last Epoch: this is not that. The top down perspective is one of very few similarities present. There are no character classes, the same skills are unlocked, in the same order, by all characters. Combat feels floaty and flaccid, with a dodge button that is on too long of a cooldown to be very useful. There is a huge focus on crafting and base building, to the extent that you must log in and prevent your buildings from "decaying" in real time (even on an offline save file). Don't take my negative review as saying this is a "bad" game necessarily. If you enjoy crafting and survival games as well as vampires this may be right up your alley. But, if like me you work full-time, this ones a bit demanding of your free time due to the basebuilding focus and "always online" nature of the game. Also as noted, if you are looking to scratch a Diablo itch, this probably isnt it.

The best survival craft game on the market. Fun mechanics, refreshing combat that doesn't get stale as you progress, and building a badass vampire castle to hide from the sun in. All of the QOLs that make a survival craft more enjoyable and less tedious are there. What more could you want?

the devs have no idea how to balance a game. every single boss fight is either so easy its boring or its so incredibly hard it borders on impossible. there should be multiple options for fighting a boss not just one meta build you have to follow for each boss otherwise its an unwinnable fight. great concept poor execution.

This game is a fine bossrush with cool unique blood type thing, but it is absolutly not a open world rpg as it claims. Everything (and even character progression) is defined at level expected from linear game, and so playing it feels like sequentially filling the checklist. Zero player agency is not something expected from open world, not something expected from rpg, and not something expected from survival game.

Kinda cool at times to play in co-op, but there are too many downsides to overlook to really recommend the game. The progression is very linear, there are no random drops, there are no class differentiation or game changing skills. So you will never wear anything that is not your "next" tier craft, and your play-style will never change no matter what skills and weapons you choose to wear. That also means you will never have an edge because you have a build or got lucky with a drop, you are always stuck at the power level you are "supposed" to be at all times to fight your next boss (which is the only way to unlock new stuff and progress) There are a lot of PvP oriented stuff even when you play solely in PvE mode, like the restriction to teleport anywhere just because you have some basic materials in the inventory or the incursions timer, events that are only available every 1-hour for just 20 minutes. So basically if you logged in for just half an hour and want to run an incursion and its timer just ran out, you are pretty much shit out of luck. The bosses are kinda interesting to beat, except the last 3 which are ridiculously hard and extremely tedious to fight. The fights are artificially made hard, meaning that there are a lot of one shots or near one shots, that requires you to avoid them every single time which would be not bad if is the combat was skill based, but it is cooldown based. Everything has a cooldown and they are way too long. So if your mobility/dodge skill is on cooldown and the boss does the one shot move, you are dead. The game has 2 bars with 7 slots each (kinda like an mmo) but surprisingly enough you can only have 2 bloody skills and 1 ultimate equipped at the same time. This kills build variation and skill based combat, because most the times you will pick the same 2 skills and they will most the times be on cooldown. The base building is quite nice but it barely matters, you should be able to benefit far more from spending time into building a great base but it's not the case here. Overall it's an interesting game, but with way too many flaws to recommend.

Update: Overall, I still dislike this title, and I really tried. Building and designing the castle is a blast. I'd give it a 10/10 if it were just a castle management game without any ARPG elements, having them replaced by strategy/sim elements. There are things I do like, and some good ideas, but the progression and balancing choices are so painful. The game did open up a lot after about 6 hours or so. Fast travel needs to be available sooner and it shouldn't be restricted by items, at all, and is a mechanic that feels copied from another successful open world survival title without much thought. Eventually you can find mounts, but they aren't much faster than the early wolf form, and the "hold to activate" event timing is really irritating in both cases. Losing several minutes in a single session from toggling mounts is ridiculous and not fun. You'll accomplish a ton in 1 hour then get stuck pushing against a wall for many. It just needs more consistency and balancing. What makes survival games feel nice are going from taking a long time to chop a tree to a short time, and that just doesn't happen here. The official servers are absolutely dead. If the progression were realistic, it would be really solid. Upgrading feels pointless. After 4 hours, I hardly notice any difference in gameplay and harvesting stats when compared to the first 30 minutes. This isn't a unique experience and most people give up before the game even starts (less than half of players have finished one of the first mini-bosses, which are about 30 minutes into the game). Unpacking it, all of your progression is locked behind quests and these mini-bosses, so the ONLY way to progress is to complete them. This isn't exactly explained, you're just sort of expected to know? At any rate, if I had, I wouldn't have purchased the title for even 5 bucks, let alone 20. Want to get into the next system? Build an arbitrary number of castle pieces. How do you do that? collect and refine resources. Oh, wait, I can't build that yet. Go kill a mini-boss. Cool, build the thing. Onto the next quest. It's copy-paste mobile survival game mechanics without the pay to win aspect. Why wouldn't I just go play any MMO where my progress isn't locked inside of a short term server. What really sucks is that the combat is crisp and there is such a large skill tree full of interesting looking abilities. Which moves into my next issue, the stats and equipment system are entirely based on two things, gear and, yet again, how many mini-bosses you have killed. Each mini-boss gives you a skill point...for a different skill tree... so, you literally can't spec into anything for dozens of hours of gameplay. You're just a jack of all trades until what I is assume 30 hours into the game where you can actually select from a full range of skills in the same tree. This is absolutely terrible game development. It would be less painful if it also didn't have a "you-are-what-you-wear" mantra copy-pasted from Albion Online. What also sucks is that the world is really cool looking and atmospheric. Most of the common enemies are bland, but that's no big surprise. Yet, the topology feels extremely artificial. It has grids, without grids. The only reason it's a gripe is because there are large obstructions that are painful to traverse. Want to get to this mini-boss? enjoy walking through an extra 6 "grids" north so that you can loop around the lake, mountain, and encampment. By the time you do you have lost half the night. Fast travel is essentially pointless in the early game. You need to be close to your base because you have limited inventory space, and at whatever point you unlock fast travel from your base (if ever) it's far enough away from the beginning experience to make the early levels that much more tedious. With all of these things combined, I feel like I spend 40% of my time in this game just figuring out what I am supposed to be doing next, another 40% getting there and back, about 10% grinding for resources to get to the next thing, and another 10% doing what I want to do, which is fight new enemies.

crafting action rpg, with a very enjoyable gameplay

I absolutely love V Rising. I've finished it multiple times since early access and keep coming back with every major update—and I already know I’ll be back again when the next one drops. There’s just something addictive about building your vampire castle, hunting bosses, and slowly growing stronger. The atmosphere is great, the combat feels satisfying, and the progression loop always pulls me back in. One of those rare games that keeps getting better without losing what made it great in the first place.

This game is one of the most well designed games I've ever played. It's well worth your time and money, even alone, even if you're someone who doesn't enjoy isometric games or survival crafters at all. The combat is best in class. Base building is meaningful to progression and has interesting twists. The atmosphere/exploration/environmental story telling are awesome. Progression feels much more dynamic than just "mine X to make new tool to mine X+1" like so so many other mediocre titles. This game is worth more than its full price. I'd recommend it to anyone. 10/10