V Rising

Great game that's worth the price. Your progression is based almost entirely on bosses. Want to start collecting iron? Time to go kill the boss that allows you to start smelting iron. Not only that, but the boss also gives you an ability you can use. The base building is awesome, the combat feels great, and the overall aesthetic is really appealing.
The only negatives for this game are:
- Pacing is really great until you're about 15-20 hours in and things become quite a bit Grindy.
- Things take real-life time to be completed. Converting a villager into a vampire spawn? Okay, it will take you 5 hours. This can be changed in your own custom server if you wish
- PVP can be a negative for some people, especially since progression is based around the bosses you need to fight. The bosses are in the open world and therefore, are free game for anyone. It can be annoying when a really high level player is in the beginner zones farming resources, because they'll just kill you while you're trying to kill a boss. It can be very frustrating. However, there are also PVE servers if you aren't a fan of PVP. I personally enjoy PVP, but I can see how it might be a negative for others

Host your own PvE server, remove Castle Decay and Teleport Restrictions, halve the farm needed from items, and reduce the waiting time for crafting items.
These changes turns it into a whole different, actually fun, game!

Word of advice for new player:
Start the game with normal world settings n play it to getting know the mechanic, if u feel like it's tedious n don't like ur current settings, start a new world n tweak whenever u like. Day time is too long? Sure, make day time shorter n make night time longer. Cant teleport with certain item? Turn off that settings. Feels like the game is too grindy? Increase the resources gathering multipliers. Feels like the tiles limit is stupid? Increase it. Boss is too hard? Increase ur damage multipliers.
Play with whatever settings u comfortable with, enjoy guys.

After 150 hours, I am finally "done" with a singular run of the game. There is a lot of things to say about this game, the game has a lot of good points, but also some questionable aspects.
The good
The game looks great! The environment design is very well done and the graphics are stunning!
The base-building system is very competent, in particular, the base relocation system is awesome and something I haven't seen any other game do nearly as well
The bosses are very varied mechanically and are all pretty interesting to fight (although I'm not a big fan of the fact that many of them spawn minions)
The game offers visually distinct storage furniture for each category of items, I wish more games did this!
The slightly questionable things
The combat
The game's combat system takes some getting used to. Your dodge option has a very long cooldown (8 seconds), while bosses attack much faster than that. The bosses are designed so that most attacks can be dodged with regular movement once you know how the bosses's moveset work, but it still makes your first fight with each boss a not very fun experience.
Furthermore, the game has a weird approach to healing - as in, healing is not really a thing. For the first half of the game, your only real healing option is "blood-mend", except it locks you in a T-pose stance while you heal, which is sub-optimal in the middle of combat.
Starting the second half of the game, you do unlock enough skills and items to be able to make a build that can self-heal, however that remains limited, and there is in fact a hard cap on how much you may heal, and the workings of this cap are so unclear that I have still not figured out how it works after 150 hours.
- To give you an idea, essentially, if you get take a full combo to the face, most of the HP you lost is unrecoverable and you just have to not get hit again.
I can't say I very much liked that, it made some bosses feel like a DPS race..
The PvE
I played on a PvE server with friends, we didn't want the pressure of PvP, and certainly didn't want the pressure of having to protect our bases from other players.
After playing for a while, it became pretty clear that the game is very much designed for PvP and that PvE was an afterthought. Some of the boss/main quest rewards have no use in PvE...
The game also does not let you teleport if you have "valuable" (which is a lot of items) items in your inventory, presumably so that other players can attack you and take it from you when you're on your way home, but in PvE that just feels like an annoying, arbitrary restriction.
Another thing that is leans heavily towards PvP and has little purpose in PvE is the "Soul Shards", those are end-game equipment that drop from the last 4 bosses of the game, geared specifically for PvP (+15% damage to vampires, so other players). These can only be stored in their own specific (huge!) storage furniture, which appears on the map of other players (for base raiding purposes, so completely irrelevant in PvE) and they lose durability simply by existing. After having lost all their durability (within a day or two), you can only repair them by killing the bosses of incursions, a world map invasion event (which itself isn't very fun because very repetitive).
Obtaining those soul shards on a PvE server left us wondering "what the hell do we do with those...?"
The grind curve
The grind curve gets pretty rough, it took me ~150 hours to "complete" (kill the final boss). You progress at a good pace until mid-game where the curve starts becoming a straight vertical line. It was rough enough that for a few weeks I was mostly just letting my servants do passive farming for me until I had enough resources to craft the equipment I needed to progress.
So you know what you're getting into, according to the Steam achievements, only 5.2% of players have beaten the final boss, which may suggest that a lot of players have dropped the game before finishing it (maybe also because of the final boss being a huge difficulty spike)
Yeah the final boss is something alright
I'm not actually sure how I feel about it, but yeah as I stated before, the final boss is a massive difficulty spike - intentionally so, the boss was given multiple different opening voice lines amongst other things because the developers very much expect you to get shit on the handful first few times you fight him.
I don't know what horror this boss must be on "brutal" difficulty and frankly I don't want to find out :), but I do have a lot of respect for the 1.2% of players who did beat it on brutal
Where cosmetics :(
This is a very minor thing all things considered, but I am a bit disappointed in the lack of cosmetic outfits. There is a cosmetic system which sees practically no use in the base game, it does see a bit more use with DLCs but still not so much, which feels like a bit of shame considering that the framework is there.
The very questionable
The game does NOT let you pick a specific amount out of a stack of items. The game only lets you split a stack of items in half, which is incredibly frustrating.
Compounding with the above missing basic QoL feature, crafting tables are not able to take materials from nearby storage, forcing you to move around your castle a lot when crafting. This is pretty baffling as the game asks you to make specific rooms for each "type" of crafting (so you'll have a forge room, an alchemy room...) so it would be intuitive for the crafting tables to be able to take materials from storage that is in the same room.
Because of the above, crafting and storing resources felt like a genuine chore and takes much longer than it should :(
I talked about how the game has distinct storage for each category of items earlier and how that was great - but it's not perfect. Some items are categorized very awkwardly; For instance, Power Cores are categorized as an "alchemy" item, so you put it in either alchemy storage of generic storage, but power cores do not have a single recipe in alchemy, they're only used in forging and jewelry, so they're very unintuitive to store..
The building system is overall very competent - except for stairs. The game does not let you replace staircases even if it's the same type of staircase with only a different skin, and that is despite having a feature that lets you easily change the color of furniture with multiple color options. The game does not let you remove stairs either if they're the only stairs connecting to the upper floor, so if you want to be able to change your stairs when you unlock new stairs, you NEED to build two sets of stairs for all your castle floors..
Trading with humans is practically worthless, despite it being a hassle to do in the first place. Human traders rarely have the items you're looking for, particularly when it comes to seeds, seeds are incomprehensibly hard to get...
Some of the animal forms have very little use. Rat form is useful for sneaking around, wolf form helps you get around faster, bear form lets you mine big deposits of minerals, bat form lets you fly, and... spider form lets you... dig into the ground (???) to "hide from enemies and the sun", except you can't move at all and enemies can still hit you anyway?? and toad form lets you jump higher but there is seemingly no benefit from being able to do so?
Conclusion
The fact that the "good" section is a lot smaller than the rest of the review may be misleading, I'm nitpicking a lot, the game is overall very good, although I really don't get why would anyone play PvP? I also don't see this game being nearly as fun without friends.
As for the replayability, ehhhh... I definitely don't feel like replaying even with the upcoming expansion, the game's progression is very linear

I lost my best friend before we even finished playing this game together. I can't bring myself to launch the game to see our castle right now, but in the hopefully near future, I will. Just to remember him and all the fun we had gathering resources, and (sometimes) cheesing the harder bosses so we could get better loot out of it.
I'll remember to feed your horse too.
I miss you man. Hope you're casting your fave blood spells somewhere in the Beyond.

Basically if ARK: Survival Evolved and Diablo had a baby and that baby was big into Anne Rice novels.

I recommend this game due to multiple aspects:
+ Unique Combat Style
+ Can be played competitively or casually
+ PvP enthusiasts can enjoy it as well as sims addicts by creating your dream vampire castle
+ They added fashion with 1.0 (RP content woo)
+ They made the spell concept look more complex, however it is simpler then before
Boss fights are fun, fighting is fun. Game is more enjoyable if you have a team. If you want to enjoy this game solo, you have to either be a tryhard and flex for PvP servers OR you have to enjoy sandbox and creating your dream castle. Apart from that the PvE aspect of the game won't take long to finish even with the new added content. You can find yourself a server that is to your liking OR you can create one. Aesthetics of the game is on point. There's enough RNG on this game for you to grind but not burn out. Progress feels like a progress. You grow out of areas which feels like a progress, however also feels like you are losing content as you are continue growing.
Bads:
- This game has no end game content. PvP is the only content. PvE content is too straight forward and when it ends, it ends. There's no reason to continue playing PvE after killing the final boss. Let me get this straight: PvE and sandbox are not the same. You can build you dream castle in different spots etc. However if you are looking for a long term PvE content, there isn't one in this game. PvE is there to gate keep some stuff that's all. No PvE raid, no PvE ambushes etc. You can add those with mods, however main game is too banal after finishing the PvE content. Which doesn't take long by the way. As a long time player (700h or so) it took my team and I less than 1 day to finish our first -blind- 1.0 playthrough in a PvP server.
All in all, I do recommend the game. There's no other game like that around in my opinion.