Already a hit on PC thanks to 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 game 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 have hours and hours to save.
Waking up in a dusty old crypt centuries after your kind was banished from the lands of humans, you are a vampire who must regain dominion over humanity. This means you have to start at the bottom of the food chain, gradually regain your vampiric abilities as you build your own castle and start terrorizing the locals.
But long before you can build a fortress befitting a vampire lord, you have to fight your way through a lot of menial work. Felling trees, breaking rocks – the usual busy work we associate with survival titles. We suppose even an undead tyrant has to start somewhere, 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 hammering home the basics.
Once you have 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, with more than 50 bearers of ‘V Blood’ scattered around the map – a particularly powerful type of red substance that should unlock your vampiric potential when consumed. These porters are essentially boss enemies, and you’re ultimately tasked with killing each of them.
However, you can’t just charge across the map and lay waste to everyone and everything from the start. Your combat prowess is determined by the weapons and armor you have equipped, so your progress depends on how high your next opponent is. Luckily, 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 more powerful gear, you need to learn crafting. And in order to upgrade your craftings, you have to start building – and that’s how V Rising’s gameplay loop reveals itself. You explore, gather resources, build, craft, kill, and then the cycle repeats as you venture into increasingly dangerous territories.
The best bosses will give you skill points that can be used to learn spells from different schools of vampiric magic, and this is where character building starts to come into play. But in the beginning, your options are quite limited and the fight can end up being quite the same. Again, it takes time for V Rising to really open up in terms of gameplay potential – and less patient players could be turned off in those early hours when you can feel like you’re doing a lot of grinding for very little reward.
But if you can accept the grind, the game blossoms into a very addictive adventure. Operating from the candlelit halls of your own castle and able to utilize devastating combat abilities, V Rising is a blast to play – especially if you’re into the whole vampire aesthetic.
Boss fights are also getting more intense. There’s great encounter design and things can get fiendishly tricky if you’re not careful. The unique mechanics and movesets make most boss battles feel like an event, and that’s impressive when there are over 50 to find.
The combat as a whole is engaging and largely satisfying. On PS5, the ability bar gives you access to the all-important dodge and two cooldown-based skills, 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 bit confusing when the other weapon-based abilities are introduced.
Suddenly you’re looking at slightly awkward button combinations for specific attacks like holding L2 and pressing R1 – both of which already have their own uses outside of battle. You’ll obviously get familiar with the controls as you spend more and more time playing, but even halfway through the game we still had to actively think about where our fingers were going.
To top it all off, the actual targeting of ranged attacks is finicky on the controller. The right stick directs your character towards its target, but the sensitivity is unnecessarily jerky to the point where you can accidentally turn your anti-hero to one side. That’s not ideal in the heat of a heavy fight.
But these complaints aren’t deal-breakers in the grand scheme of things. It’s abundantly clear that V Rising was built as a PC version, and to be fair to developers Stunlock Studios, it did well to tie everything to a controller. We’re sure that post-launch updates will address many of these criticisms.
By the way, you can play V Rising online, either co-op or competitive. The game is great as a solo experience, but teaming up with a friend or two adds an interesting dynamic as you create something of a vampire empire. Meanwhile, going against other players is interesting for completely different reasons. You need to start thinking about protecting your castle against intruders and potential ambushes while you go about your business. In fact, competitive play can quickly turn V Rising into a back-and-forth mess, but it’s a tough choice for those who don’t mind the inevitable chaos.
Whether you’re playing alone or online, the first thing you need to do is set up your server – and here are some welcome settings to play with. For starters, you can adjust the difficulty of the game to an impressive degree, tweaking things like damage values. You can even make it less difficult to gather resources by increasing item yield across the board. For what it’s worth, we think the defaults are finebut we would totally understand if you wanted to get around as much as possible.