I read someone else's blog about this game and commented about how I have had this game on my wishlist for a long time now but it just never got cheap enough to entice me to get it. Well at the moment it is available for the grand price of NADA if you are a PS-Plus member so there was no time like the present to get involved.
Initially I was enthralled by it and thought it had a lot of potential, but honestly, after 3 hours I feel as though this game is a time-sink that I am not going to be willing to put the effort in to make it great.
Without getting too technical I will describe V-Rising as being a Diablo-style game that has a rather heavy focus on base building. So even though I have never actually played it, I'm going to suggest that it is a bit like Fortnite.
You venture out, collect materials from just about anything you swing an axe, sword, or mace at, and then head back to your chosen castle/keep location and build up your base. You get progressively stronger and enemies get progressively tougher... just like every other game.
To keep things as varied as possible, the game keeps giving you objectives to complete in order to advance the "story" but really all this is to me was a very drawn out tutorial to show you the ropes on what it takes to build your castle effectively. The rest of the time you are simply venturing out at night to kill, gather materials, and maybe hunt down a special target or two. It's simple enough and when you do get killed it isn't really a big deal because just like in Diablo games, you just need to go collect your corpse in order to get all of your goodies back.
I died a lot in the start and I think you are supposed to. This is how they teach you about what the penalties of dying are, and how it is just part of the game and nothing to get all worked up about.
It isn't very clear what the heck you are supposed to do when you first emerge from the cave and venture out into the world and when you first get started on building your first castle, you are likely going to build it in a stupid place and only realize that it was a poor choice of location once you have done too much to really reverse that choice.
The building process is kind of fun, I guess but after a while that just becomes the entire game. You are venturing out simply to look for copper, because you need copper, and the killing of enemies just becomes something you have to do because they are in the way of you getting to the copper. The same can be said for any other material that you end up needing. While this might appeal to many, to me it seemed like a ton of rather tedious busywork.
Days go by, you stay in the shade during the day and run amock at night doing whatever you want and then as dawn approaches you are probably seeking a way to get back to the safety of your keep and therein lies that major problem I have with this game. If we aren't allowed to do things in the daytime, which is expected of a vampire-oriented game, there needs to be a fast-travel option to get back to your safe space. Perhaps there is one but in 3 hours or so, I've not discovered it. I spend an inordinate amount of time backtracking to my keep or if I get stuck, simply standing in the shade somewhere waiting for it to become night again.
Then I chop down some trees or slash at some rocks until my inventory is full... run back to the keep, stash all my mostly useless crap, and go and repeat the process.
While combat might get more involved later on, at the start it consists of hack and slash to the max. You run up, swing your weapon a few times, then you move out as the enemies do their extremely predictable counterattack. You do have a parry ability of sorts, but it has a cooldown, as does your one and only dodge. So in any sort of prolonged encounter, you are mostly just going to be running up, swinging a few times, then fleeing to a distance to perhaps use one of your only ranged offensive tactics which also have cooldowns.
I don't like to be negative, but combat is rather dumb. It isn't difficult or unfair, it's just not very intelligent. Diablo combat isn't intelligent either, nor is any other hack-n-slash game, so I guess that is acceptable. You don't gain levels by engaging in additional combat so there is actually very little incentive to get into battles if you don't have to.
Inventory management can be quite a pain as well. I don't pay much attention to every little thing in my inventory at the time I have it and running out of places to put all the mostly useless crap you pick up gets to be a real bane after a while. Also, when you are crafting back at your keep you have to physically go and pick up the item in question and then carry it to whatever workstation you are using to build something. It doesn't just know that this particular item exists in the inventory storage somewhere inside your keep.
This to me was one of my biggest problems with the overall game. I find it exceptionally stupid that I have to run to several different lockers looking for a particular kind of stone that I stashed somewhere 2 hours ago, just so that I can continue to make bronze ingots. The game KNOWS that I have it, it just isn't going to let me do it unless I physically walk to the particular locker, put it in my inventory, then carry it over to the table in my inventory.
This is unnecessary busywork and it gets to be very frustrating about the 217th time that it is an issue.
I believe the entire point of the game is to build as good of a castle as you possibly can and for some, that might be fun. For me, especially using a controller on a PS5, this is not so great. I think if I was using a mouse and a keyboard I would like it more, but like a lot of games that involve the building of anything, a controller just isn't a very good option in this sort of thing.
I don't even have a roof on my building yet and I haven't gotten to the point where I can do that. I don't think I will bother since it doesn't really seem to make a great deal of difference as far as anything truly meaningful is concerned.
At the end of the day, I cannot complain too much about this game because I paid exactly zero dollars for it. It's a quite slow-paced Diablo style game that involves building a castle, and that's basically it.
You get to be a vampire, which is cool, but I think that most people are going to tire of chopping down 400 trees to gather enough wood to build walls around your always expanding castle.
I think this is something I will walk away from for good and move on to something else.
If you enjoy the game (and I know at least one of you out there does) then I am happy for you. To me, this game is a slog of doing the same stuff over and over again and you get brief moments of glee when you finally can build a new chair or something like that. I don't get enjoyment out of that so therefore, I am going to have to give this one a pass.