V Rising First Impression
A new survival ARPG, vampire fantasy game, is knocking at the door. Today, we are covering my first impressions of V Rising, an amazing game, and five things you need to know about this game. As a first impression of the game, I was amazed at how much I enjoyed playing it after playing it for a while. Soon we will post more in-depth reviews, but for now, I can only offer my first impression.
I have seen a lot of gaming trends about this Base-Building Survival Game being an MMO. But V Rising is not an MMO, but an online action RPG Vampire Survival Game. There are no massive Asymmetrical Multiplayer Game elements, but if anything, it is just a co-op game with 36 other players running around in a shared world. While V Rising is similar to Lost Ark or Albion Online, we can’t compare them. Besides, V Rising does have mobile gaming opportunities like Genshin Impact. I would love that.
Creating Character
Let’s take a closer look at what V Rising is all about. You first start the game; you need to create your vampire using the character creation tool that comes with the game. Moreover, you can create your character class in PvE Servers or PvP servers. However, I find it effortless to do it.
Once you make your vampire, you are thrust into the tutorial graveyard, where you learn how to fight, gather materials, and craft rudimentary tools. During the first few minutes of the game, you will get a small taste of what you will be doing for most of the game.
After the tutorial, you are thrown into the Farbane Woods and left to fend for yourself with almost no direction. Some people will like this; some will hate it. I love this aspect of the game. The open exploration and the almost go-anywhere attitude are what I like to see in an open-world game.
So far, V Rising has delivered in this regard, and I just loved that I could explore wherever I wanted. There were no invisible walls, boundaries, or areas you couldn’t access because you weren’t skilled enough.
Building a castle heart
The first thing I had to do was create a castle to get started.
Each player has to create their castle, an estate, which can be as large or as small as they want. You can add gardens, palaces, prison cells, etc. As for me, I am a simple guy who enjoys simple things. I only need a massive room with all my crafting stations and storage containers, and I am sold. A loft apartment is exactly what I am looking for.
However, if you are someone who likes housing and those types of systems, V Rising might be able to scratch that itch for you. So the game gives you everything for base building. After that, it’s up to you to discover new recipes and blueprints and unlock all kinds of new visuals to help you make your dream castle.
So, I am trying to say there is some effort you will have to put into getting what you are looking for. You will also have to find a specific item or decoration that you are looking for. Beyond that, you will also need suitable materials to craft that thing.
Mining and Crafting
There is no denying that mining and crafting are where the grind rears its ugly head the most. So, V Rising is heavily focused on crafting and basic resource gathering. You need to harvest tons and tons of materials to progress. Just like in any other survival or crafting-related game, you are required to gather stone and then refine it into stone bricks.
For instance, you need like 20 stones to make one brick, and each wall takes ten bricks. In short, you will have to collect 200 stones to complete each wall. I do not want this to be a huge time investment or a grind. Therefore, I did not want to do it, or it was like pulling teeth. It was not like that.
However, I also do not intend to downplay how much time you will spend hitting stones with your hammer or cutting down trees with your ax. I would spend a few nights farming resources to make my base upgrades, which apply to all aspects of the careful inventory management game.
Whether it is harvesting lumber, stones, animal skin, bones, or vegetation, you will be required to harvest crafts. Then upgrade to unlock better and better stuff and make progress, so if you are looking for a 100 percent combat-focused game, this one probably is not for you. If you do not mind getting out and doing some grinding, crafting, gathering, and all the fun stuff, then you can enjoy V Rising. My personal preference is to have the whole mining experience.
Combat Mechanics
I want to shift gears and talk about the other half of the rising, which is the combat, and I want to talk about everything that combat entails. So being a game from Stunlock Studios and them having created BattleRite, you can expect one thing, vigorous MOBA combat. This is precisely what you’ll get with V Rising.
Despite being an early access game, they did a fair job to the game. You must aim and land your spells to deal damage. You have counters; you can give yourself buffs; if you can time them properly, they can save your life. Furthermore, you have shields, leeches, and so on. They are all very MOBA-like skills. This game makes one feel like it was built on the BattleRite engine. If you are someone who enjoyed that game and its combat, you should feel right at home.
Combat Types
If you are somebody who likes Path of Exile, Diablo, or Lost Ark, you want a bunch of skills to use and spells and things like that; this game may not scratch that itch for you. There is a possibility that you will find it a bit simplistic for your taste.
I want to break down combat and discuss it in more detail in this article. You have two forms of action.
- Weapons, and
- Spells.
Weapons
There are four weapons available in the game.
- Sword,
- Ax,
- Hammer, and
- Spear.
You will be harvesting tools with all of these. Therefore, you will use the same weapons, attacking something with a sword or cutting down vegetation with your blade. The same applies to your axe. Once you reach the copper tire of firearms, you will also gain weapon skills. It changes from bone to reinforced bone, copper to iron, and so on. Once you reach copper, you get your first weapon skill, which gives you another skill to use in combat. This adds another layer to combat.
Until then, it was just basic attacks and the one spell you have. An example of what a weapons skill is:
> Axes, you could use blood frenzy, which deals damage and gives you a temporary attack speed buff;
> Spears, you can unleash a flurry of thrusts;
> Hammers, it is a wind-up smash; and
> Swords, it is a whirlwind.
Personal Opinion on Weapons
From my experience, weapons are your filler damage. These are used to carve down enemies while your spells cool down. I understand where the developers are aiming with this concept. They want spells to be like your nukes and your weapons to be something that you could spam. However, in my experience, the weapons are still weak, and they failed to cause significant damage or generate excitement when I used them.
Instead, I would sit there and spam them. I would then eagerly wait for my spells or skills to come off and cool down. This would enable me to get back into the fight. The game felt like a MOBA damage dealt was incredibly low, and enemies had quite a bit of health to work through.
Unless you were fighting minion-like creatures, basic attacks worked well. Otherwise, your basic attacks felt incredibly hollow. This damage can be amplified as you go, and you can equip a new set of weapons, from bone to copper to iron. If compared to spells, it will significantly increase your damage. They were designed to fall short a tiny bit. So, that is it for weapons.
Spells
The next topic I would like to discuss is spells. Spells are the exciting and favorite mechanic of V Rising combat. They feel pleasant to use. The feedback is incredible. You can tell their strength right from the start, which is excellent. It is a gratifying feeling when you first begin V Rising. You will have some blood spells at the beginning.
However, as you venture out and defeat bosses and progress through the game, you will unlock more spells of various types. Spells like frost can be like a frost hawk, freezing enemies as it flies. Chaos bolts burn your targets with purple fire. Furthermore, Unholy summons vile beasts and deals decay damage. I had the most fun with illusionary creatures and things like that.
I could experiment with different combinations. You can equip two spells at once, as you can pair them up, but it was interesting seeing how they worked together. Combining an illusion spell with a frost spell gives me something exciting.
Personal Opinion on Combat
Some pairs work well together, others not so much. However, honestly, these would work well. They would nuke minions or take huge chunks of health off the boss if you could land your skill shots. I just found it to be very satisfying to use. Ultimately, combat in V Rising is a tale of two types. You have weapon combat that looks fun; it feels enjoyable, but the damage and the spammy nature just did not hit the spot. It did not deliver what I had hoped for.
On the other hand, you have spells that are fantastic and well-designed abilities that both feel great to use and have damage to satisfy you, and I am hoping to see some improvements to the weapon in the future. So that’s my overall impression of those two pieces, but that is not the only thing that influences your combat.
Blood Essence
You also have something called a blood type, and these are cool, and this kind of plays into a vampire thing for V Rising.
When you fight enemies, they will have a blood type, like rogue, creature, brute, etc.; when you get their health down low enough, you can feed on them. By doing that, you can maintain your Blood Pool. Furthermore, providing on them allows you to suck their blood and instantly kill them. This is an execution move, but it changes your blood type to theirs if you consume it. The Blood Meter will show you how much blood you have consumed.
In addition, you will be able to gain certain buffs that can be used in combat. For instance, a row gives you an increased critical chance or a chance to expose armor, increasing the damage the target takes. Depending on the quality of blood you feed on, going from zero to a hundred percent, you will unlock more or fewer buffs, and these blood abilities are a neat system.
Personal Opinion on Blood Essence
It gives even the weakest of minions a chance to have pristine blood quality and gives you a reason to go out and fight them. Think about all the different types of games that you play daily. V Rising has this silly nonsensical creature sitting there, and you just run past it because why waste time on them? You could have the same situation where you have these incredibly bottom-of-the-barrel enemies that are weak and insignificant, but you are running by.
You are like, whoa, he has a hundred percent rogue blood, and I will thrive off that, so I need to fight him, take care of business, feed on him, and get that blood; that way, I can go and tackle some more challenging bosses. It is a wholesome approach that I find appealing. In my opinion, this is the end of the combat. Before we move on, I have one last thing I want to talk about: four weapons. This was a major issue for me. You have a spear, ax, hammer, and sword; most of the time, harvesting or fighting bosses, you will only have these four weapons to use.
In other words, weapons are limited, and I was very disappointed. I understand the game is not Diablo, where you will not have fountains of loot or hundreds of different weapon types to choose from. However, even having ten weapons makes a huge difference. I would love to see vampires’ daggers, whips, and other weapons. I think people will be disappointed in this limited set and quickly get bored by repeatedly seeing the exact gun.
The World of V Rising
Now, I want to talk about the world of V Rising. The name of the world is Vardaman. It is enormous, and I mean a massive world. They managed to create this world, and I love it. The entry zone of the Farbane woods is huge. They have bandit camps and strongholds. You can see the pack of wolves, treants, and stone golems patrolling the roads, but the thing I love most is how alive it feels.
Stunlock did a great job creating a sense of immersion and liveliness in the game. There are enemies on the roads and merchants on the streets you can ambush. Sometimes bosses show up and give you the battle to remember. You’re farming copper ore, and suddenly a boss shows up, and you’re like, wow! What are you doing here? All these things seem random and help you break up the monotony.
Random Incident on V Rising
When establishing your castle, you will follow the same roads and paths to gather resources to farm, collect points of interest, or accomplish a goal. So running the same street and passing those same camps over and over again is becoming boring. But having things like an understanding of randomness will help you.
You will be more engaged and on your toes because you do not know when Tristan, the vampire hunter, will appear. He will come and wipe you out super quick. You need to be able to either get away from him, or you have to fight him, and maybe you will end up killing him, who knows.
But overall, I like this, and I hope to see it continue throughout the entire experience. During my time, I could clear Farbane Woods and work my way into Dunley Farms, which are eerily similar areas. Both feature lots of green foliage and are like winding paths through the countryside. However, a key difference is that more humans and towns are in Dunley than in Farbene.
Blood Units
This is probably one of the slam-dunk things in V Rising. I loved blood unit spells. I know I already talked about spells, but I wanted to keep this section separate from combat. This is because they overlap, but there is so much more to these elements than just making your character stronger.
Early in the game, you’ll encounter something called the blood altar. This is something you can place in your castle that helps you track down elite enemies. You can defeat these enemies to unlock new spells and craft in crafting stations because V Rising does not feature a leveling system. This is the type of progression you will use.
V Rising Enjoyable Mechanics
You will use these as milestones to work towards and then kind of gauge how powerful you are or where you are in the game. These bosses are no joke, and I can tell you that. First, they are easy, and once you get a few under your belt, they dramatically increase the difficulty, starting with the bandit king. I was able to solo most of these bosses easily. Max, I died once or twice, but for the most part, it was simple. Bandit King required me to grab some other players before I could get him. I was like, help me, and I got a party together, and we headed out.
We, as a group, did not have a comfortable time either. After being wiped out three or four times, we were able to bring down the bandit king, and for me, that was an absolute blast. I loved these as they felt challenging enough that I didn’t get bored, but they were doable even if I had a lower gear score than required. It was a good balance of challenges, and I think many people will enjoy it.
It is not something you can walk into and push over. Still, at the same time, it does not feel like a soul. You are just throwing bodies at the boss and trying to learn the different intricacies of the attacks. More of this is just planning and figuring out what you should do and being able to execute, so it felt way more doable, which I liked the most. I mentioned something in there called gear score.
Gear Score
Gear Score in V Rising is the average of all the items you have equipped. As you upgrade your gear and weapons, you increase your gear score. This allows you to take on harder and harder bosses. As your gear score increases, your health, damage, and all of those things will also increase. You walk through, and you kill the bosses. After that, you will consume their blood. Doing that will give you new spells, which are permanent unlocks, but that is not the only thing you get.
In addition, you get a potent spell, but most of the time, you will also open new crafting workstations, new recipes, or new baseline vampire skills like shape-shifting abilities. These skills enable you to pick out different blood types and see what blood type an enemy has before you go and encounter them. All those things are packed into these blood units that you must find and track down.
Final Thoughts
Overall, guys, I enjoyed this game, which is my first impression. I feel some core gameplay mechanics need to be improved upon or expanded upon. The weapon system and gameplay loop might become more challenging as the game progresses. I am not sure, but I think the game has fantastic potential, and I plan on writing a more in-depth review once I have been able to sink a lot more time into the game.
But for now, it is just one of those games that I am looking forward to getting back into playing, and I am already going through and forming a game plan on what I need to tackle next, what bosses I want to go and take care of, what recipes I want to chase after. It continues to draw me back to the game outside the actual world. I think this is an excellent game that I am looking forward to playing. I hope you are doing well and have a good day.
Read our Stray review, if you liked our first impression article.