The villagers flee as you look for your need feeding of blood to sustain yourself. As you progress, your castle grows you continue to fill it up to the brim with instruments. You lay waste to those who get in your way, including a lot of bosses along the way.

This is one of those games that has so much going on that you don’t notice all the little things adding up till around mid-game. Then you become somewhat shocked at all the little details. This game, in a way, as you progress, solves a lot of pain points that you tend to run into in these kinds of survival build games.

I’ll admit, my first half an hour into V Rising, I did not have the greatest opinion of it. I found it perhaps a little too strange for me. The whole being a vampire that burns during the day and having to replenish your blood on occasion. Just was not something I thought I'd enjoy.

Thankfully, in situations like these, I always aim to play for at least two hours to see if maybe the game will grow on me. It's been almost 70 hours of gameplay later. I’ve advanced quite far in my solo game. I've joined a friend's game to have some fun playing with them. I’m even going to be joining a private server soon. While yes, in those almost 70 hours, I've restarted over more than once. This game is addictively fun after you have grown for the taste of blood.

This game really rewards those who pay attention to little details. Early on, you build a little base out in the open. It’s not much, but you got some walls up to keep creatures and possibly any players if there are others on your realm out.

You can’t just build anywhere on the map. There are a ton of spots you can claim. With the default setting allowing you to have two locations. Most spots a player can set up in have quite a lot of edges to that land mass. Once you get a feel for what they kind of look like, you can easily spot them.

You can also tell the game has gone through some rebalancing of land. Some areas are great for being up high and having a limited number of chokepoints if you are playing on a PvP server. Others allow for more usable land or perhaps are next to a critically important resource on the map.

Playing on a solo map and then with a friend, where you might as well just call it a PvE server. Looking for a location with choke points and setting up my castle, it's land in a way, for possible PvP is not my concern. Instead, over time, for me, it was all about having enough usable space for building.

Once you realize that having crafting and refining machines indoors speeds things up. Along with having the correct floor type, reduce costs. You start finding yourself wanting to optimize for that. Sooner or later, you have outgrown your castle multiple times over, and it’s time to find a new spot and rebuild from scratch.

You can’t exactly copy and paste your old castle build into a new area. What you can do is set up a new location with the option of transferring. Any walls, flooring types, chests (with anything you have stored in them), and machines you simply have to select where you want them to be placed. Once done, everything gets moved over to your new place, and anything extra gets put in a moving bag.

Having a system like that alone is a massive deal. It would have taken me forever to relocate and set up at a new castle. While usually you don’t have enough flooring to fully set up in your even bigger castle than the last castle. Just the time savings alone and having the ability to get a decent starter build set up are amazing.

Building is also rather easy in this game. Not only can you just move things like forges around when needed. You also get 100% of supplies back if you choose to remove something like a wall. Making it easy to expand if you have enough land, or at the very least reconfigure your castle layout to better fit your needs moving forward.

I can’t tell you how many times I've redone my forging room. It used to be just big enough of a room to hold a forge and a crafting bench. In my latest castle build, this entire room is dedicated with room to growing anything that gets a bonus from being placed in a room with forge flooring tiles. This is also just one of a dozen or so rooms in that castle.

Over time, you do unlock a lot of decorative stuff as well. I could put in things like rugs, decorate stuff on the walls, and even things that look like they belong in a smithing room. I still, however, have not fully moved into my new place yet as I work out some of the finer details of what works best in terms of refining and crafting flow.

There are even some later-game features you can unlock to solve a lot of issues you start running into with a massive castle. Everything from having teleports to move around in the castle. This is great when you start building multiple-level castles.

Along with setting up a system that moves items from refiners to storage or even into a crafting station. Such a solution, however, costs some costly materials. It is, however, kind of cool to set up some automation, even a little bit.

As you upgrade your castle's heart, the main piece of it. You also unlock not only a higher max of floors you can put down. You increase your servant slots as well. Servants you can send away on missions to gather resources at a site.

While I have very little automation set up personally. As the only requirement really for even using it is the main quest line wanting you to try it out. I just enjoy doing most of the gathering of resources and putting them into their respective refining machines myself. You do get to a point where you are like, “I no longer want to farm any more iron.” Not that I use a lot of iron these days. It’s, however, something you still need once in a while.

I do feel like having servants out gathering for me is something I'll be using a lot more once I start playing on a private server that will be up 24/7. This will also allow me to at least be making some progress towards getting the resources I need, even when I can’t be playing as actively as I would like moving forward.

As far as progression goes in this game. It tends to follow the loop of you needing to loot a small quaintly of a higher-tier item to build your next set of gear and weapons. Once you have defeated a higher-level boss, you now use raw resources to craft that higher-tier component.

Just having the materials is not enough. You also need to unlock the ability to craft armor, weapons, and jewelry. Thankfully, the game offers three main ways of going about this outside of individual bosses, giving you certain tier levels. You can randomly get recipes dropped while farming. You can buy recipes from vendors that rotate about every hour if you have enough coins. You can also spend resources to unlock at random different recipes at a study or even an Athenaeum.

I personally love the fact that there are multiple different ways of getting a recipe to unlock a new crafting recipe. I don’t know how many times I'll have enough silver to buy the pair of gloves recipe I need. The vendor, after a few hours, still has none for sale. I’m clearing some random village and opening a chest to find what I was looking for in the first place. I’ve even lucked out a few times and gotten one decent drop from a boss kill as well.

As far as the boss killing goes, it's quite gear level dependent. The game has a system where the higher the target is to your gear level, the more damage you take and the less you do to it. Meanwhile, the opposite is true: the higher you are over it, the more damage you do and the less you take. So, while each item upgrade might only give you a marginal boost in health or damage. It’s the gear level that really takes things over the edge, from fights you thought were not going to be possible that are more than doable. Despite you only getting 10% better stats.

Another important aspect of the game is the type of blood your vampire drinks. Not only does blood have quality. There are different types as well. This allows you to find the type of blood that gives you boosts to your kind of playstyle.

I personally prefer the benefits of rogue blood. You will also notice I have it at 100%. Early game, just finding blood that gives you the first two tiers of benefits from that type of blood, you feel like you won the lottery. Later on in the game, you can capture and extract blood from prisoners. I now have an NPC with 100% rogue blood that I ensure is in perfect health. It took quite a while to luck out finding one with max quality blood.

As you kill bosses, you also start to unlock spell points. You even get school mastery once you have enough of a certain type of spell unlock. These spells can even be further augmented with gems to add a nice bonus to them as well.

This is also when you start to notice a little of little things start adding up. Having a few spells unlocked for some bonus. Using potions for a little more damage and speed. Having the right blood type for your playstyle that has decent quality. You can really start to amass power and strike fear into your enemies once things start lining up. Even more so during a blood moon, where your bonus from your blood type is increased.

Final Thoughts

The further you progress into this game, the more in-depth different systems become. The more you realize that a lot of time and effort were put into why certain things are the way they are. This game is also quite the vampire on sucking you in to just do one more thing. Before you know it, you've been having fun and hours, and oh my, look at the time, you really need to log out.

Information

Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about V Rising (tracking link that takes you to the game's Steam page. I receive no commissions on sales. It’s simply a request to be used by the game publisher).

Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.