V Rising isn’t a new game, but it’s caught our attention again because of a special Halloween event it’s hosting this weekend. The event, termed Bloodfest in-game, will see V Rising being playable for free from October 28th to November 1st, 2022.
As part of the in-game Halloween-themed event, V Rising’s developers, Stunlock Studios, are also releasing fitting DLC that you can claim starting now. The DLC will no longer be available after November 7th, so hurry on over and claim it now. The new DLC includes all sorts of Halloween-themed items, such as spooky interior decor and ghostly lights.
In addition to the DLC drop, V Rising is also including a brand-new gameplay configuration called the Mad Hunt. This new server preset will randomize the locations of V Blood, its technologies, and spell unlocks. If you’d prefer to only add one of these three features, you can apply them individually.
As is usually the case with game updates, this most recent one also issues numerous fixes for endgame content, as well as making a few adjustments in terms of the game’s balance.
In other news, everyone who celebrates Halloween puts their own unique spin on the social phenomenon. Some people construct elaborate tricks to enact upon visitors; others, like the folks over at Adafruit, issue warnings that Doom may be running on candy in your Halloween hamper. To each their own, but I’d certainly be more than happy to find a candy bar with gaming capabilities in my candy collection.
V Rising tips don’t end with “stay out of the sun” or “don’t carry silver“. The surprising indie hit has captured the attention of many people thanks to a successful Early Access and backing for Stunlock Studios from Tencent. While the game mayfeel familiar for fans of titles like Diablo and Valheim, we could all benefit from a road map sometimes.
Beyond following the quest guide and objectives, here are some V Rising tips for things you should always be doing. Or, at least, you may find yourself always doing it whether you like it or not.
Always be farming
Like any game with a resource system and base building, you’ll always need to be farming materials for building and crafting. The exchange rate can be especially brutal and take a long time. But, that just gives you more time to go out and farm more materials!
The biggest of V Rising tips here is to use the right tool for specific jobs. Swords are great for vegetation while axes are great for chopping wood. When harvesting stone, copper, or other hard materials, use the mace instead.
Loot all enemies and camps
As with games such as Assassin’s Creed, players can find materials and items as they attack bandit camps and other locations. Early on, this is especially necessary as you may not know all of the recipes needed to craft certain items such as new armor or building materials.
Just be careful that you don’t handle Silver too much; it sucks away your health as you carry it.
Track V Blood carriers
Not only are V Blood carriers integral to completing quests, but you also need the helpful abilities and recipes you get when you take them down. For instance, Keely the Frost Archer provides your first unique ability: Frost Bat. This is especially useful against brutes and warriors who charge you head-on as it slows them down.
Moreover, being able to craft more and more items will help you improve your castle. And that’s really the whole point of the game, isn’t it?
Hide from the sun
It goes without saying that, as a vampire, you should avoid the sun at all costs. Even with things like sun potions or additional sun resistance, you can quickly die from sun exposure.
When you need to travel in the daylight hours, utilize tree shade in wooded areas or hale bales in villages. If you are working on your base before you can craft roof tiles, utilize a mist brazier to block out the sun. It’s a life saver of an item in the early game.
Use cave passages to travel distances
Waygates require you not to have any resources in your inventory. That’s difficult in a game where resource gathering is a core mechanic. So, cave passages represent a useful shortcut that helps you get from one area to another — especially during daylight hours.
Try out new ability combos
Games like Diablo are all about creating unique builds and load-outs with armor and abilities. V Rising trades in this, as well, offering players many avenues to become a dominant nightstalker once again. So don’t be afraid to switch things up as often as you want to — especially early on.
In addition, certain abilities may be extremely effective against one V Blood carrier or boss, but useless against another. Keep that in mind as you traverse the world of Vardoran.
Keep an eye on your blood type
Feeding on different creatures or types of humans can alter your blood type. For instance, at the beginning of the game, you are set to “Frail” since you’ve only had rat blood so far. This quickly changes once you feed on a human or wolf. Different characters have different purity percentages, as well, which dictate the level of stat boosts you get.
In total, there are 6 blood types including:
Creature – think bears, wolves, or other animals. This type boosts your health regeneration and movement speed initially. At higher levels, it provides damage reduction and sun resistance.
Rogue – archers and thieves provide this blood type. You’ll get buffs to critical hits, crit chance, cooldown reduction, and movement speed from it as you level it up.
Brute – this type initially provides life steal when you drink from bandits. You’ll eventually get attack speed, movement, and health recovery boosts, as well.
Warrior-armored bandits and militia soldiers provide physical power boosts at level 1. At higher levels, you’ll get weapon skill cooldown increases, damage reduction, and chances to parry incoming attacks.
Worker – non-violent or weak NPCs qualify as the “Worker” blood type. This increases your resource gain, horseback speed, damage against resources, and more.
Scholar – scholars provide spell power, spell life leech, and spell cast cooldowns.
Bonus V Rising tips: different forms & DLC
The various forms you acquire by collecting V Blood carriers include the very first one: wolf form. This has many perks such as faster movement speed to help you traverse land more quickly. However, other animals like bears will not attack you while in wolf form. Don’t forget to use all the various forms to your benefit.
The optional DLCs are also a great way to support the developer further while picking up some unique cosmetic items along the way. The cheaper option provides Dracula’s regalia while a more expensive option includes unique cosmetic items and new forms including that cute, unassuming grandmother you see above.
Saying something is “Diablo but better” is a tall, over-simplified order, but V Rising really does deliver on it. The vampire-centric game has elements of base building, combat, bounty hunting, survival games, and loads more. The camera movement, top-down orientation, and abilities even make the action RPG a bit MOBA-like. It has also been likened to recent indie darling Valheim-another indie game with base building.
As it has something for everyone, it may also not be successful in pleasing hardcore fans of one particular genre. So let’s break down V Rising for its story, mechanics, performance, and design to see how it stacks up to the excitement around the latest title from Stunlock Studios.
Stunlock Studios, the development company behind this game, doesn’t have too many games under its belt. Only founded in 2010, the Skövde based studio released their first game Bloodline Champions for Windows PC in 2011. Their subsequent titles, Battlerite and Battlerite Royale, were both MOBA-like in nature.
Chinese megacorporation Tencent took a controlling share in the company in 2021, but V Rising began to gain traction thanks, in part, to Early Access. To date, more than 1,000,000 players have logged into creating their castles and challenging daywalkers.
Setting & tone
“Awaken as a weakened Vampire after centuries of slumber in a world full of danger. Stripped from your unholy powers and starving for blood – you must hunt to regain your strength and fight for survival.” That’s what developer Stunlock Studios sets players up with for V Rising. But they also pose the question “will you become the next Dracula?”
That said, the open world-game takes place in a gothic era countryside. Animated skeletons stalk the night along with bandits, treants, vampires, and all kinds of creatures. Vardoran, the name of the in-game world, doesn’t seem a very hospitable place for anyone.
V Rising story
The basic setup of the story is a weakened vampire slowly regaining its power. However, Stunlock Studios gives players a decent amount of agency as they choose what path to follow. You can become a diplomat or a total, bloodthirsty count or countess. You can even simply convert humans to worship and serve you.
Beyond that, you’ll just have to play and see for yourself what unfolds based on your choices in the dangerous locales around Vardoran.
How long to beat V Rising
V Rising does not have a strictly linear story like in Sifu or Ghostwire: Tokyo. As such, the time it takes one player to “beat” V Rising may differ wildly from any other. Game producers said that the Early Access version of the game provided 40 – 60 hours of content.
In addition, some closed beta players said that they spent ~80 hours in the game. For now, expect to dump a decent chunk of time into this game — especially if you’re playing with friends.
V Rising performance
As with all new games from smaller studios, V Rising has had some hiccups in terms of performance. However, the relatively stable Unity engine keeps things moving fairly smoothly. The game also does not have platforming or jump mechanics outside of prompted “jumps” where your character flips down a small ledge.
With an impressively small footprint of just 6 GB, the game delivers much more than it costs in terms of monetary price and storage. That said, some players will encounter specific glitches. For instance, V Blood bounties will sometimes not spawn where they are meant to.
The “Unstuck” feature available to players in the “Esc” menu is one solution for this. Using this feature revives players at their coffin or a discovered waypoint with their equipment. Sadly, you do lose the rest of your inventory and will have to backtrack to fetch it if you use this feature.
V Rising gameplay & functions
Loot features heavily in the game but it serves more of a crafting purpose than anything else. For instance, players get their first unique set of armor very early in the game as part of the base tutorial. You have to upgrade your armor to unlock more features for your castle.
These integrated crafting tutorials may feel a bit unnecessary for seasoned players of RPGs, but it doesn’t hold your hand entirely. The freedom to travel wherever you want (sun damage pending) is very freeing. Pro-tip: spend any more than 3 – 5 seconds in the sun and you will rapidly begin to take tons of damage. You’ll likely be killed within mere moments, so keep to the shade of trees if you have to travel in the daytime hours.
By far, though, the biggest feature of the game is the V Blood system. Unique characters in the world are known as “V Blood” people from whom your vampire can attain new abilities. This can be as simple as learning to make leather to getting a fantastic new ability or animal form.
UI and interface
Fans of games like Diablo will find the overall UI setup familiar enough. Despite this, it can start to feel cluttered often. Let’s break down the basic elements of the UI:
Blood gauge – in the center of the lower bar and displays how much blood you have and what your current blood type is along with what bonus it offers.
Inventory hot bar – located in the same lower bar, this 9-item hot bar lets you switch between weapons or items by pressing numbers 1 – 9 on your keyboard.
Special abilities – your abilities are on the lower bar on the right-hand side. As you grow in power and take down V Blood bounties, you’ll gain new abilities.
Mini-map – located in the upper right-hand corner, the mini-map is okay, but players will often need to refer to the full-sized map for better context and waypoint management.
Objectives – these are displayed in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
Right-hand side hotkey bar – the greyed-out buttons on the right side of the screen have things like a Journal, Inventory, etc.
Inventory screen – this screen with your character equipment, inventory, and crafting options pops up on the left side of your screen when you press “Tab”.
Crafting or item window – this screen pops up on the right side of your screen when you use “F” to interact with an item such as a Furnace, Blood Altar, etc.
Control schema
Gamers familiar with top-down camera titles like Divinity: Original Sin 2or Grim Dawn will recall the top-down camera angle. While you use W, A, S, and D to move, the right mouse button moves your camera around in the default control schema. Of course, players can customize these to their preferred setups.
Key mechanics
The game features many different abilities, animal forms, and mechanics that can greatly impact how you experience the game world. For instance, when in your wolf form, other wildlife will not attack you.
In your humanoid form, many animals will instantly become aggressive toward you. Being in your wolf form also grants you increased movement speed. However, you will still take damage from the sun if you stay in it for too long.
That’s really the main mechanic outside of your general RPG combat and base building: staying out of the dang sun. As mentioned earlier, you will be burnt to a crisp within seconds if you don’t get into the shade of a tree during sunlight hours. Your castle can also utilize Mist Braziers to block out sunlight before you can build roofs.
Pro-tip: in-game night hours are from 7 PM to 9 AM while daylight hours are from 10 AM to 6 PM.
World, sound, & character design
World design: An open world where you can’t climb walls
Due to the simplicity of the map design, players cannot do things like slide down or climb rock faces. This isn’t a huge problem, but having to run around short rock facades that you could easily climb in real life does not feel rewarding.
Only after you gain new animal forms and abilities can you easily traverse the terrain. Of course, some players may enjoy this facet of the game as it presents just one more challenge in the journey toward becoming a full-fledged, powerful vampire again.
In terms of the foliage, stones, and water, the map feels organic. The forests flow from one area to the next with small streams or lakes dotted around. There are deserted cemeteries, small villages, bandit camps, mines, caves, and more.
Sound design: Solid and atmospheric
Like games such as Minecraft, music and sound effects can play an integral part in games with base building mechanics. Without any music, the crafting and resource gathering may become monotonous. Without sound effects, your character is liable to get ambushed often. Luckily, the V Rising developers considered both of these factors.
The soundtrack sets the tone well while also alerting players to specific scenarios with consistent musical motifs. Unique monsters such as Treantshave their own attack noises and combat music willplay and then fade as your player enters or exits combat.
Character design: Limited but fun
The depth of variation in V Rising when it comes to creating your base character isn’t very deep. You can’t adjust eye width and head size or select body types. However, you can still create a sinister-lookingmonster or a rather normal-looking nightstalker. Armor selections as the game progress can further help you customize your look.
Other character design for skeletons, creatures like wolves and bears, as well as bandits is fairly straightforward. However, the art style that falls somewhere between stylized cartoon and 3D cel-shaded strikes a perfect balance of quirky and easy to enjoy.
Verdict: Get this game!
V Rising is the perfect game for people who need something to disappear into for a while. If you’re in a bit of a gaming slump, pick this up. If you need a break from competitive gaming like League of Legends or Overwatch, pick this up. Need to forget about the real world for some time? This game is perfect for that.
The crafting and resource gathering can become a bit tedious or repetitive at times, but that doesn’t detract too much from the main gameplay loop. Gathering powers and challenging yourself with new V Blood victims never gets old.
Download V Risingtoday to start reclaiming your vampiric prowess.
PROS
Fun gothic aesthetic with classic vampire designs
Challenging boss fights and unique abilities for everyone
Satisfying castle building and upgrading
Loads of replay potential
Custom private servers are available
Developers quick to apply fixes
CONS
Resource gathering and crafting can get tedious
Sun mechanic may turn off some players
Inventory management is a bit cumbersome
Enemies can glitch such as V Blood bounties not spawning where they should
