Paul Goshi

Let me start by saying this isn’t a typical early access game. My experience with early access is on the whole bad. I prefer to wait until titles that launch early access reach a satisfactory finished state. I’d name darkest dungeon and subnautica as excellent examples of this. Despite the full expectation that all gamers seem to hold that any early access title will be finished and will have a lot more finished/added by the end, I treat the model as “prove it to me first.” Most don’t deliver to expectation. Then you find a game like V Rising. After I saw several friends playing the game, I checked out the trailer and a couple of YouTube’s of the gameplay. The concept interested me right off the bat and when I reached the purchase page on steam I was actually surprised to see the caution that this game was early access. I had no notion. It doesn’t remotely look unfinished and frankly it looks much more polished than the great majority of early access titles after the point where they label themselves launch state. After buying the game and starting, nothing proved me wrong. Nothing is placeholder, nothing doesn’t work yet. The game plays incredibly smoothly, all functions referenced seem to already be in the game, all structures work and have animations, the thumbnail graphic art is incredible. There’s plenty to do, a ton of combat bosses and abilities and equipment and a big map to search. You will hear a lot of praise for the combat and it’s well deserved. It feels a lot like a faster league of legends which has the focus on enemy attack patterns and the potential punishing mechanics of a souls like game. It’s fluid and you have a lot of fun options to change things up with your vampire powers (spells) and each weapon having completely different arcs and special attack types. The biggest pull of the game for me is the world building. Most sandbox survival games are flat empty worlds of procedural generation and minimal interactivity outside of whatever you dream up playing with the physics engine to amuse yourself. This world shares a sense that its living and breathing without you that I would attribute to two of my all time favorite worldbuilt settings: subnautica and the elder scrolls morrowind. Like those two games this one has a handcrafted map and a world full of creatures and npcs who have their own agendas , from wolves looking for their next meal whether it’s a nearby deer or a roaming bandit, to villagers working fields and militia patrolling roads. Bosses often patrol set and logical areas and can encounter not just you, but hostile wildlife and even each other, and sometimes insane fights erupt in the most unlikely places. I’ve seen three, four boss pileups happen out in the wilderness and watched the chaos in the form of a rat hiding off the road to see. The game is beyond worth the price even with the early access label. It would be worth it at twice the price. This game is not just fun and well made but incredibly finished in an age where incomplete games half made has been regrettably accepted as a norm.