Released in early May, Stunlock Studios brought a new open-world title to gamers with V Rising. Now available on Steam’s Early Access program, players will become a vampire and set out to reclaim their glory. With the Stunlock Studios release, we decided to check out the newest Early Access game. Find out how it is with our review of V Rising.
Story: Rebuild your vampire kingdom
After centuries of slumber, you’ll awaken. A weakened vampire, you’ll have to hunt for blood to survive. Then, heading out into a vast open-world, traversing the various territories to rebuild you’re fallen vampire kingdom. Convert humans in the surrounding villages into an army of loyal followers. Hunt down legendary creatures to gain new powers and rebuild your castle, setting out to become the next legendary Dracula. The story in V Rising is more of a basic plot to set up your character and then go off on their adventures. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for something with more of a story, you may want to check out something else.
Gameplay: Fun and flashy combat, with tedious, time-consuming crafting
Rebuild your empire and reign again in darkness and blood. Risen from your grave, you’ll have to set out and resurrect the age of the vampires once again after being cast into the shadows by humans. Set out into the vast wilderness, traveling through the ruins of land once ruled by your kind, and find the perfect for staking your claim. Battle enemies of all species and obtain their power for your own, becoming the lord of all vampires.
Stunlock Studios built a large open-world offering territory that will have various bandit camps, villages, farms, and strongholds. These locations will offer items to be looted, units to convert, and creatures to defeat. Exploring more of these areas will open up new materials to harvest and use for upgrading your tools, items, and buildings.
In your weakened state, regaining your vampiric powers will be one of the first things. Gaining new abilities are done through the hunting of unique creatures. These creatures contain v blood which rewards the player with active and passive skills and new crafting recipes to build better gear and a better cast e. to track these creatures down. First, you’ll have to build a blood altar that will allow you to track these unique enemies.
Crafting your kingdom as a frontier vampire
In our review of V Rising, we found it to be like many other survival games. Crafting will play a large part in this Stunlock Studios release. You’ll start with nothing and only have some basic crafting abilities, but gathering more resources and tracking down enemies will unlock further crafting recipes. Crafting can be confusing at times, having to track down recipes by defeating the enemies containing v blood, so playing through can be held up looking for specific recipes needed for a quest. Crafting can also be time-consuming, waiting on smelting ores or leather to be tanned. These tasks can become tedious after a few hours. But, ultimately, crafting is key to gaining new power and restoring your castle.
Like you, improvement is just as crucial to your castle building. Your castle will need to suit your needs as you grow. In the beginning, you’ll have an enclosed space with a few crafting tables, but soon you’ll be able to begin building your castle. Building your castle will not be as simple as constructing your ideal structure, but more thought is required to have the perfect castle. Constructing your rooms in the right way will the proper tiling will offer bonuses to your crafting tables, boosting their capabilities. Players won’t find many things they’ll dislike while playing V Rising, offering variety to build and level up. But some may find the crafting and building tedious.
Graphics/Audio: A beautifully dark world
Players will get a beautifully detailed and stylized world using the Unity Engine designed by Unity Technologies. Featuring five different biomes with features that suit their accompanying region. The team at Stunlock Studios cleverly uses the lighting systems in V Rising as a mechanic with the player needing to avoid direct sunlight, moving from shadow to shadow. Terrian can be difficult to navigate at times with many backtracks or going out of your way to navigate with paths to other areas being slightly linear.
V Rising utilizes a zoomable and rotatable camera the camera itself operates with few issues as intended. Unfortunately, the camera itself is cumbersome with no vertical rotation. When zoomed, the player isn’t given any ability to see further than a few feet in front. Through most of our playthrough of V Rising, the camera would be zoomed out, only zooming in to check out an outfit or get our castle’s roof out of the way. These issues aren’t anything that will probably deter anyone from checking out the Stunlock Studios release V Rising. Hopefully, some more camera options will be added.
Conclusion: A dark stylized action survival RPG with a lot of potential
V Rising will off players interesting combat, decent world design, and excellent boss design with a reasonably deep building and crafting system. Unfortunately, many of these activities are time-consuming and will take up much of your time in V Rising. Leading to long and somewhat dull periods between combat. While these issues should not deter you from giving the Stunlock Studios release a chance with a lot to offer between playing solo or online as it is in early access, there will be much more to come.
Lastly, If you’re interested in picking up V Rising after reading our review of the Stunlock Studios release, you can find it on Steams Early Access program for $19.99. If you want to learn more about V Rising, you can find out more on the games product page. Additionally, you can learn more about Stunlock Studios and their other titles on their development page.
