V Rising: Game Review

V Rising is a sudden hit on Steam. One million copies sold in a week. A game from an independent developer in the boring survival simulation genre, where there is gathering and processing resources, creating new things, building a shelter and timid boss raids. Why such sudden love? Everything is simple. You have to play as a vampire.

He hides in the shadows

The first thing you have to get used to in V Rising is that all folk methods of dealing with vampires work. Garlic poisons and weakens the ghoul. Silver is destructive, so you have to throw coins out of your pockets. Consecrated earth and fire deal tremendous damage, and if you go out into the sun for a few seconds, the carcass of the lord of the night, roasted to the bones, is ready. Now he’s so pathetic.

V Rising is a survival simulator where you, alone, on a separate server, or with friends or strangers, crawl out of the crypts and see a cozy fantasy world in front of you. You are an omnipotent being who can cast spells and turn into animals. You are a nocturnal predator, the top of the local food chain. At first you are weak, but over time, everyone will tremble before you. Moreover, you will have not just a castle, but a real research and production complex with obedient servants, stupid zombies and cells with living people. They need to be fattened so that the blood tastes better … It seems like a paradise.

But in this world everyone knows who vampires are. And they know how to fight them. So the path to power is blocked by nuns, vampire hunters, patrols with experienced soldiers with all their rich arsenal to counter the bloodsuckers. Oh, and don’t forget the monsters. If there are vampires here, it is reasonable to assume that necromancers, werewolves, and stone elementals live somewhere in the neighborhood.

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The world of V Rising lives

Forgive the tautology, but this “survival simulator” does a good job of “simulating life”. It seems to be nothing complicated, but how many games do you see, for example, how bosses calmly stomp along the roads and arrange fights with each other? The undead fight people. Warriors protect the passages to the peasants at checkpoints. Wild animals try to tear the throat of any traveler, but if a vampire transforms into a wolf, then the pack stops responding to him. If a werewolf accidentally breaks into the village and starts to fight everyone, then the smart vampire will go sideways to the still unoccupied settlement.

Here everyone fights against everyone and against you in the first place. And it can and should be used! If you need to fill up some kind of boss, then he should be carried away into the thicket, where a revived tree is trampling.

Count’s castle

The path of a vampire in V Rising begins with a simple character creation editor. Do not focus on appearance, then it will be possible to change it. Then we learn to attack, collect resources and create simple weapons. For the sake of convenience, for the extraction of stone, ore and wood, special devices are not needed. The same sword is good for everything. And it doesn’t deteriorate over time! Comfortable.

Once in the open world V Rising, you are faced with the fact that you need to establish your own castle. And here you have to be very fast in order to stake out a profitable clearing, until other vampires have captured the best site.

The problem is that there is not enough land suitable for construction. And if you want to rebuild the castle complex, then at first you will have to run around properly, and after that you should never relax. It is necessary to spend resources, designate all available land as our own, so that no one else poke their nose at it.

On my first server, I made a strategic mistake. On the very first dayin V Rising, I did not mark the hill I found as mine, and as a result, two more grew up next to my castle on a relatively small patch. And that’s all, there is no room for expansion, but we need to grow, because, once again, we have not just a castle, but a research and production complex. I set up a sawmill and a stone crusher, relaxed. And then… Coffins for minions, graveyard for skeletons, a teleporter for fast travel around the world, materials processing benches, crafting benches, research tables, an alchemy lab and, of course, a throne!

Vampire abilities

The uniqueness of the local development system lies in the fact that it does not exist, in the usual sense. Whatever you do, experience does not grow, levels do not rise, skills do not appear. To get something, you have to earn it – kill some boss.

There are three dozen bosses here, and almost everyone gives the vampire combat skills, recipes for creating things and a new machine. So our hero learns to turn into animals, teleport, freeze or set fire to the victim, heal during the battle. It’s a pity that only a few skills can be used at the same time, but you can change them freely in a calm environment.

The armor and weapon rating in V Rising determines the combined level of the vampire. You can come to the server if, say, your friends have invited you, take their clothes, dress up, and immediately become a real ghoul, a storm of nuns. By the way, don’t laugh. These ladies kill with their holiness better than axes and swords.

Bosses V Rising

Named enemies in V Rising are great. You will have to meet with them often, they are regularly reborn and go about their business. There is no need to kill them again, but the first battle with them will definitely stick in your memory.

The bosses are varied and inventive: there are strange, barely resisting; there are vile, attacking from afar and teleporting; there are funny ones, like that plump grandmother. She just screams heart-rendingly and rushes around the village, attracting the attention of the guards. There are creepy ones. You see them, you turn pale and retreat into the shadows for the time being.

Before V Rising, the game’s developers, the Swedish studio Stunlock, made MOBA Batterite and the battle royale Battlerite Royale. Top view, different heroes with unique skills. It’s the same here, and it’s good! The combat system is simple: the teleport is actively used, the strike with the selected weapon and four skills. No mana. Skills recharge quickly, so it remains only to monitor the environment so that a crowd of guards does not get involved in the battle, and the terrain, hiding behind trees and boulders.

The taste of blood

The vampire needs blood. But not any. Any suitable only for survival, so as not to die of thirst and wounds. If it really presses, you can get a rat from the inventory and have a bite to eat. The quality of the victim’s blood is of the utmost importance. The higher it is (displayed as a percentage), the more passive bonuses the vampire receives in V Rising. It also matters what the victim did before his death. The blood of a rogue or scholar bestows various abilities.

Hamster Simulator

Popularity, financial success, tens of thousands of players online – it seems that V Rising is repeating the path of last year’s Valheim. An absolute hit and one of the best games of the year. But there is a problem, and not one, but three.

• First, there is no fast travel. More precisely, there is a teleport, and you can quickly find yourself in the right area. But back, having filled the bag with extracted resources, you will have to stomp for two. Or four if you turn into a wolf or steal a horse. Since a lot of resources are required, these “walkers” along the same routes begin to piss off over time. The path is long, with occasional minor collisions. Magic disappears, boredom begins. Why the teleport doesn’t let through vampires loaded with cotton and iron ore is a mystery.
• The second problem V Rising is the routine of extraction and processing of resources. Over time, the life of a vampire turns from an adventure into a job. You look at the item you want to make, figure out where and what materials you need to collect, stomp there. You hammer ore, you come back. Minus 30 minutes of life. You unload everything into the smelter, let’s say 1000 units of ore. One ingot of iron from 20 units of ore is smelted for 2 minutes. And you need to get 30 ingots … Wait an hour. There are assistants ready to go for resources in a dedicated area. That’s just poking around they will be there for 24 hours. Real time. And the further you go along the production chain, the more time it takes to collect and produce.
• Finally, the third problem V Rising, a critical one, is that this world is static. In the sense that this is not a procedurally generated landscape, but a hand-drawn little world. There are few open spaces, and if a piece comes across, then vampires immediately build it up. As you travel, the textures of the earth, trees, the quality of settlements change, but there will always be narrow paths.

Vampire War

V Rising offers three types of servers. PvE – the most comfortable. There is simply a joint development of the world with castles, raids on settlements, killing bosses and a sluggish struggle for resources. They respawn quickly, so no one cries.

PvP in V Rising is a tin in the flesh. You kill, you are killed, resources are taken away, your locks are broken. It’s not just that the developers immediately say that it’s better to go to such servers together with friends in order to immediately create a clan. Thanks to the combat system focused on the opposition of the players, such battles are played in a hell of a fun way. So I would recommend this game primarily to fans of humiliating and dominating. Plus, with friends it is much easier to kill bosses, collect resources, rebuild and strengthen the castle.

The third type of servers – by their own rules. This is where your imagination runs wild.

Early version V Rising

V Rising is based on the Unity engine. The game was released in an early version. It has a huge open world, life simulation, dozens of players connect to one server, who immediately begin to build it up and ruin settlements. This is a complex system, and it is all the more surprising that for the entire time of the game I have not encountered a single, I repeat, not a single bug. The game did not slow down for unknown reasons, did not crash to the desktop, the hero did not fall into the ground. Quality unattainable for “professionals” from major studios.

The game V Rising is beautiful. The night is bright, the moonlight floods the space with a silvery light. The day forces the vampires to hide under the trees, with the shadow following the course of the sun and shortening at noon.

Diagnosis

Playing V Rising alone is fun, but about 20 hours. Then you stumble over the lack of land to expand the castle and fly into a quagmire of mining, transportation and processing of resources. It gets boring. But with friends, this “vampire survival simulator” can drag out not just for tens – for hundreds of hours. Especially on the PvP server, where you can rob cows and storm castles. Thrills are guaranteed.

On V Rising, I would recommend to pay attention to novice developers. Here, the battles with a top view are cool, there are many different bosses, you don’t need to spend mana on skills, the world lives, and the cycle of day and night is skillfully woven into the game mechanics. There are a lot of interesting ideas in V Rising, and even if you don’t like the “survival simulator” genre, the game is worth paying attention to if only in order to broaden your horizons. And I would also recommend sending “professionals from AAA studios” to Stunlock for an internship. Several Swedes once again took and made a big, complex project.

Pros V Rising

• Vampire simulator with all attributes
• Diverse and interesting bosses
• Unusual development system
• Cool combat system
• Simple castle building
• Gothic aesthetic
• Spectacular graphics and attention to lighting
• Can be played alone or with dozens of other vampires
• PvP and PvE servers
• Flexible settings of your server allow you to fix most of the shortcomings of the game

Cons V Rising

• The boring process of mining and processing resources
• Constant jogging back and forth along the same route
• So far, only one static world is available. Need more