V Rising review | Vampire Fixer Upper
WACO, Texas (KWTX) -
I’ll be honest, I haven’t had much experience with ARPGs or RPGs for that matter. And actually I haven’t played that many top down games either. So, other than that I was actually the perfect person to review this game.
Going in with a clean slate as it were.
Due to time constraints (personal life/my real job) I wasn’t able to experience everything V Rising had to offer, but after about 10 hours of I do feel like a I have a good grasp of what the game can be.
First of which is huge. The map on V Rising is so much larger than I anticipated for a game that was only a 5 GB download. Which is truly unbelievable considering just the latest update for Call of Duty took up half of my console space. I spent most of my play through in the beginning Frabane Woods area trying to collect building elements to reconstruct my castle while also fending off creatures of the forest. It was so dense with all manner of flora and fauna that I never went very far without finding a material worth harvesting or having an encounter with an enemy.
To that end fluid combat is a central focus of V Rising. It is literally the second thing you learn how to do. And I found the combat to be engaging if not a little repetitive. Cast spell, swing weapon while you wait for spell to regenerate, cast spell again. Granted as you progress through the game and vanquish more enemies, you unlock more powers and different spells. That paired with the variance of enemies helps to break of up the tedium.
Speaking of tedium, the main focus of V Rising seems to be trying to rebuild your castle and kingdom. Harvesting resources (and blood) to try and reclaim what you lost. What you lost is semi-explained in an animated prologue at the start of the game. Other than that you aren’t given much backstory (or much story going forward for that matter).
One of your first and otherwise permanent goals is getting your castle off the ground. You have several spots where you can start your build, but be careful. You can start your castle right next to an enemy that you aren’t powerful enough to kill at the start of the game. Thus never truly being able to build enough elements without being obliterated by reanimated bone pile, dropping all your gear right next to it, and then starting over at a Waygate miles from where you started your build.
Not that this situation happened to me or anything…
Once I understood the mechanics of building, it actually became routine. Complete tasks to upgrade gear, to then be able to build more. Simple enough. The mechanism that can get in the way of that however is that you are in fact a vampire, so building and exploring during the day gets a little tricky. V Rising has a well thought out and realized day/night cycle. As you might expect tasks become easier during the night, and much more difficult when having to avoid rays of sunlight during the day. In fact building can become near impossible if you cut down the trees that block the sunlight from hitting you castle. Several times I was forced to sleep in a coffin while waiting for night to cycle back around.
Doing tasks during the day wasn’t totally impossible. The game gives you some leeway early on with the tree cover you are able to hind under. However it does feel like time can run out rather fast for your character if you’re caught out in the open.
Overall V Rising is a fun ARPG/Survival/Building sim that splices in frequent and fluid combat. What it lacks in story, it makes up for in scale, pace of play and how populated the game is. I look forward to coming back to this game again and again.
8/10.
Copyright 2024 KWTX. All rights reserved.
