V Rising Console Version Review

The vampire “devil” with survival elements and optional creative multiplayer support attracted attention two years ago when it was released in early access on computers. Hundreds of thousands of players played it, and more than four million copies were sold. In addition to an interesting idea and successful execution, the success of the game was also due to the care of the developers, who fully used the preliminary access to improve and fine-tune all possible aspects of the game. The full-fledged finished version has now appeared on consoles, and for now specifically on PlayStation 5.

• Platform: PS5 (review version), PC
• Publication date: 11.06.2024
• Manufacturer: Stunlock Studios (Sweden)
• Genre: ARPG for survival
• Czech localization: No
• Multiplayer: Online, 10-60 players
• Data for download: 5 GB
• Play time: 60+ hours
• Price: 949 CZK (PS store)

Become the master of the night

The game doesn’t put much emphasis on the story, with only a short animated introduction to set the tone and some dialogue before the main boss fight. However, there is a story to the world that you gradually piece together from these partial elements, along with markers in the game menu and specific parts of the game’s environment, such as the giant crater with blood crystals where Dracula was defeated, but not before his death cursed the entire empire with a bloody rain that turned people into bloodthirsty vampires. You are one of the vampires born this way.

Although at first glance the game is mostly an isometric action RPG in the style of the Diablo games, at second glance you will notice the presence of significant elements of the survival genre, whether it is the need to forage for food or gather raw materials such as wood or stone to build your lair. As is common in the survival genre, the story of your vampire will be more about his journey from a vulnerable forest creature with a simple lair to the ruler of an entire kingdom, with a giant multi-story vampire castle full of cages and willing and unwilling servants.

At first glance, it is an isometric role-playing game in the style of Diablo games.

The measure of your progress in the game is not only the growth of your vampire mansion (by the way, you can easily have several bases or castles) and the constantly improving equipment and abilities of your character (including the transformation into different animals with unique characteristics). It is also a leaderboard of targets or enemies that you must find and defeat in the huge open world of the game. You can easily imagine it as a “list” of pyramid targets that need to be eliminated in the Assassin’s Creed series. The higher the target is on the ladder, the higher its level, and also the more dangerous the circumstances – the first targets can be reached simply by a forest path, but more advanced ones are hidden, for example, in a giant cathedral, which, thanks to the consecration, deals damage to you just by its presence in its depths.

Install something

Survival games often suffer from the annoying grind, when you spend too much time boringly chopping down trees instead of exploring an interesting unknown world or fighting enemies. But here you don’t have to worry about such a problem at all, because the game allows you to set almost anything, including dozens of modifiers related to the efficiency of resource collection, item prices and many other features of the game. In practice, you can completely set not only the difficulty or duration of the game, but also whether your server will be blocked for anyone else, so that you can enjoy the game without being distracted by one player. Or, on the contrary, you can allow up to 60 players into your world, with up to 10 of them belonging to your clan, and the rest, on the contrary, follow you, playing the role of rival clans of vampires.

The result is a game with an interesting concept and a successful combination of game genres and mechanics, with a high degree of adaptability to your ideas, and with the optional possibility of interesting multiplayer gameplay, with friends and random teammates (or opponents). Everything looks good, sounds good and at the same time controls well – on the PS5 you can choose between quality and performance settings, and when playing in performance mode the game more or less reliably maintained 60 frames per second and looked great. Thanks to the high dynamism of the game structure, it is also a game that can be just as fun to play again after the first playthrough, especially thanks to the presence of more players or a higher difficulty level.