Embrace your dark side and lurk amongst the trees stalking your prey as you release your inner evil as a vampire in Stunlock studio’s “ V Rising”. While only in ‘Early Access’ this top-down, survival game has already surpassed one million in sales due to its pure addictive nature.

You used to rule the lands and own the night, but man had other plans. For centuries, you have hidden away in the darkness waiting for your uprising. Your hunt begins again now as you awaken to rebuild your vampiric empire. Your job now is to collect materials as you lurk in the shadows by day and tear through bandit camps at night, upgrading your loot and your castle as you go.

Firstly, the game opens up with what is considerably a fairly decent customisation menu. With a vast array of options for looks, hair and physical features your vampire can be anything you desire from kawaii to god awful looking. My character looked so awesome and it can be changed via a mirror in your den. It was such a shame that you don’t tend to see your character other than an ant-sized character and wished some cutscenes had been worked into the game.

Running a PVE or PVP option for the aggressive or casual, you are also about to choose between online play, local and dedicated servers. Either way, the ultimate goal is to build up enough resources to either overcome the bosses alone or overcome the bosses to enhance your power to overcome your friends or strangers.

The game runs in day and night cycles. During the day the sun sets your character on fire so you must lurk in the shadows of surrounding environments. I love this concept as it doesn’t force you to stay at a base but be more tactical in your adventures. A genius concept at play. At night, you can roam free unleashing all your wrath on the world. You navigate with WASD (lacks controller support) and mapped out to letters are your powers that have a cooldown much like the famous dungeon crawler, “Diablo”.

These are easy to manage and simple to master. Being a vampire means you also need to feed on victims and creatures to keep your blood pool full to prevent your body going frail. The survival aspect requires you to chop, mine, and harvest resources to upgrade your base camp into a gothic vampire dream castle. Boy, oh boy, can you make your castle look ballin’. In this lair, you will develop tools, benches, and research new blueprints to steadily improve combat and defences of your character.

At times, the game seems to hit a wall when the boss is beyond your reach level-wise and you are stuck to just chopping wood or mine stone. It is even more annoying when something you need is locked behind a certain boss, which is pretty much as it can be a complete slog to gather the materials through minor encounters. The bosses are definitely worth the end reward though, each with their own set of moves and each supplying you with unlockable materials and skills. They are certainly a highlight of the whole experience.

The graphics are reasonably animated and are actually quite cute and cartoony stylised but the environments are so far pretty similar. You will explore mostly wooded areas and mountain ranges covered in snow, with the end goal being strong enough to trundle through and slaughter the townsfolk of Silverlight Hills, a densely populated village of very challenging enemies. The music also complements the atmosphere with some traditional spooky mumblings.

The in-game menu for resource collecting is really well done. The developers have really thought about what a survival game player would like and have developed systems where you can obsessively count your supplies and even group them with stuff sitting in your boxes already. Innovative flairs like this really speak to the community.

Now, while I mostly played PVE I did dabble in a few PVP servers. PvP is a hit-and-miss affair. Go into a full server and all the best places are taken in the low-level areas. Building in a higher level at the beginning means getting slapped whenever you exit the safety of your home. A smaller server means you never see anyone and gets boring. There is definitely a balance there, somewhere, I just haven’t found it yet.

Ok, sometimes a vampire can’t be cool when all they are doing is cutting down trees but it sure can be addictive building a settlement and commanding slaves to do your bidding. V Rising while not perfect offers a little something for everyone; action, building, versus friends, wasting strangers, and collective raiding. WIth some moments slower than others the high moments definitely don’t suck the soul out of this title.

Written by: Stacey