Already a hit on PC through early access, V Rising is coming to PS5 as it enters version 1.0. This is an isometric action RPG not unlike Diablo, but instead of focusing on loot, this blood-sucking adventure emphasizes crafting and building. It’s a nice mix of genres, but it’s fair to say that the game struggles to show its true worth until you’ve spent hours and hours saving.
Waking up in a dusty old salt flat centuries after your kind was banished from human lands, you are a vampire who must reassert dominance over humanity. This means you have to start at the bottom of the food chain, gradually regaining your vampiric powers as you build your castle and start terrorizing the locals.
But long before you can build a castle fit for a vampire lord, you have to do some heavy lifting. Chopping trees, breaking rocks – the usual busy work we associate with survivalist crafting titles. Even a dead tyrant has to start somewhere, we suppose, but at least V Rising gives you clear goals to strive for. Early on, the game does a good job of easing you into its crafting system, directing you to specific resources and getting the basics up and running.
Once you’ve got a base up and running in a location of your choosing, the real V Rising begins. The game takes place in a fairly large open world and scattered across the map are over 50 carriers of ‘V Blood’ – a particularly powerful type of red stuff that, when consumed, should unlock your vampiric potential. These carriers are essentially enemies of the boss, and ultimately, you are tasked with slaughtering each and every one of them.
However, you can’t just go loading onto the map, laying waste to everyone and everything from the word go. Your combat prowess is determined by the weapons and armor you have equipped, and thus your progress is limited by the high level of your next opponent. Fortunately, there’s a handy V Blood menu that lists all the bosses and their respective power, so you always know what you’re up against in terms of raw stats.
In order to equip yourself with stronger equipment, you need to start working. And in order to improve your creativity, you need to build – and thus the game cycle of V Rising is revealed. You explore, collect resources, build, craft, kill, and then the cycle repeats as you venture into increasingly dangerous territories.
Rewarding bosses gives you skill points that can be used to learn spells from various schools of vampiric magic, and this is where character builds come into play. But in the beginning, your options are pretty limited, and the fight can be pretty much the same as a result. Again, it takes a while for V Rising to really open up in terms of gameplay potential – and less patient players can switch off those early hours, where it can feel like you’re doing a lot of grinding for very little reward.
But if you can embrace that grind, the game blossoms into a highly addictive adventure. When you operate from the candlelit halls of your castle and are able to use devastating combat skills, V Rising is appealing – especially if you’re into the whole vampire aesthetic.
Boss fights also get more and more intense. There’s some great encounter design here, and things can get extremely complicated if you’re not paying attention. The unique mechanics and movesets make most boss battles feel like an event, and that’s impressive when there are over 50 of them to find.
Combat as a whole is solid and mostly satisfying. On PS5, your skill bar gives you access to an all-important dodge and two cooldown-based abilities, as well as an ultimate that unlocks later. Each move is tied to a specific button, which is perfect, but the control scheme – which isn’t fully customizable at launch – gets a little complicated when additional weapon-based abilities are introduced.
Suddenly, you’re looking at slightly awkward button combinations for specific attacks, like holding L2 and pressing R1 – with both of these inputs already having their uses outside of battle. You’ll definitely get familiar with the controls as you spend more and more time playing, but even mid-game we had to actively think about where our fingers were pointing.
To make matters worse, actually aiming your ranged attacks feels difficult for a controller. You use the right stick to guide your character in the direction of his target, but the sensitivity is unnecessarily choppy, to the point where you can accidentally roll your antihero to one side. This is not ideal in the heat of a hard fight.
But these complaints are not setbacks in the grand scheme of things. It’s pretty clear that V Rising was built as a PC release, and to be fair to developer Stunlock Studios, it’s done well to tie everything to a controller. We’re sure that post-release updates will address many of these criticisms.
You can play V Rising online, by the way, either cooperatively or competitively. The game is great as a solo experience, but teaming up with a friend or two brings an interesting dynamic as you create something of a vampiric empire. Meanwhile, taking on other players is intriguing for entirely different reasons. You need to start thinking about defending your castle against invaders and potentially being ambushed as you go about your business. Indeed, competitive play can quickly turn V Rising into a back-and-forth obstacle, but it’s a solid option for those who don’t mind the inevitable chaos.
Whether you’re playing solo or online, the first thing you need to do is set up your server — and there are some welcome settings to play with here. For starters, you can customize the game’s difficulty to an impressive degree by changing things like damage values. You can even make it less difficult to gather resources by increasing item yields across the board. For what it’s worth, we think they are the default values goodbut we’d totally understand if you’d like to avoid the fray as much as possible.