V Rising Early Access Review in Progress

ign.com:

Remember when Count Dracula spent several sleepless nights deforesting an entire hillside so he could manufacture industrial quantities of wooden planks to build his castle? Yeah, I don't either – but in V Rising, that's a big part of your vampire lifestyle. Luckily, it's also got some fast and exciting ARPG combat to make up for it. I’m now a bit more than halfway into crossing off its list of bosses, and so far, those showdowns have been worth the drudgery of grinding for resources.

As a newly-resurrected vampire coming into a world where humans have mostly chased your kind into the shadows, this mashup of Diablo and ARK: Survival evolved doesn't waste a lot of time on storytelling. The descriptions for its varied bosses give some sense of how the world is put together, but there's not really a plot to follow. You build a blood altar, you get a list of special enemies you need to kill to unlock new abilities and better technologies, and you're off on the hunt. This doesn't bother me too much, but I do occasionally find myself wondering what my ultimate goal is supposed to be.

Part of that is because a lot of V Rising kind of feels like a slog. Gathering resources is slow going, and refining them at crafting stations takes even longer. Thankfully, if you're playing solo, you can set up a world where trees and ore veins yield more resources and refining goes much faster. This is probably the only way to make the experience tolerable if you don't have a vampire clan to help with all the crafting chores.

And even then, there's a lot of waiting around for ore to smelt or for boards to be milled. You can go do other things while this is happening, but progression is hard-locked behind crafting recipes that require these refined