V Rising Review

thesixthaxis.com:

When I think of the vampire fantasy, I picture the secret societies and the intrigue. I think of stalking prey through the night maybe, like, a cape & ascot customisation minigame. Minecraft-style crafting and base-building is the last thing that comes to mind when I picture what I want out of a vampire power-fantasy game, and that dissonance is what kept me away from V Rising for so long. Coming around to check the game out in its 1.0 release has been an incredible surprise, though. While the vampire simulation seems thin at a glance, what this game accomplishes in streamlining and incentivising the usual tedium of survival games blew me away.

There isn’t any dense world-building or character-driven drama spurring you to action in the opening moments of V Rising. You awake and arise from a coffin, all vampire-like, and you’re given a list of bounties and a goal: reclaim your vampire power. The idea is that each of the 50 boss battles present on your bounty list rewards you with a different vampire ability, and also takes you across various realms that scale in difficulty as you grow. This loop was everything to me. I always suffer from the lack of direction in survival-crafting games: I find my focus depleting and my interest in playing further entirely vanishing. The constant boss-battle goals and your checklist of progress for them kept me engaged – and as I progressed through the list, I naturally found myself falling into the other systems of the game all too naturally.

Another thing that kept me engaged with V Rising is that, unlike so many other survival crafting games, it isn’t set in a massively open or procedurally generated world. The game feels and handles much more like Diablo, guiding you through hand-crafted and sometimes claustrophobic environments. The visuals of these varied biomes aren’t all that impressive, as the game rocks a consistently underwhelming color palette and aesthetic throughout. What matters more, though, is how these more structured