V Rising

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 turn V Rising into a wholly distinct, genuinely fun game!

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

it's fun if you:
1. Play PVE.
2. Play with 1.5-2x loot modifier.
3. Enable teleportation with materials.

Otherwise have fun wasting half of your gametime running around the map and gringing materials more than actually doing anything meningful

Vrising is a one-of-a-kind top-down survival, Melee, and magic RPG featuring PVP and PVE, with WASD movement and a spell-targeting system that makes it both fun and rewarding.

If you're interested in the PVE aspect of the game it has an extensive progression that relies on killing bosses and unlocking new blueprints to make you stronger, soft interesting lore, nice visuals, and one of the best building systems that will bring the designer in you, you can decorate and design the castles in crazy details, check some of the builds on YouTube see what some people came up with.

It has one map but it's carefully crafted, progression takes you from one zone to another while each zone is distinct and well-defined, has its mood, and is set up with a nice attention to detail and nice mob variety.

Now if you're interested in the PVP in short don't, spare yourself. Whereas the PVP is one of the most fun PVPs you might have it's unfortunately poorly balanced. PVP servers usually last 2 weeks before dying and you have to repeat the progression to enjoy another 2 weeks, Meta builds tend to be spammed in the open world and render the game very stale and boring, raiding mechanics haven't been optimized since forever, and feels like they gave up on them among other things.

This game isn't a live service game it's an indie game and the devs said that they don't have plans or intention for players to keep playing this game forever, so it ends, your "endgame" will either be PVP or decorating and because it's not constantly balanced for PVP or quite frankly, they don't know how to, that's why all these issues exist, side note Vrising is from the same devs of battlerite, you can see how that one ended up.

With all that being said Vrising till the time of this review remains maybe the only Melee and magic open-world PVP game outside of MMORPGs and it's still more unique since it has a targeting system that makes it skill-reliant

All in all it's a great game and it goes on cheap, also all the DLCs are cosmetics, you just need the base game and you have access to all the contents.

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.

One of the best Vampire games out there.
The game is a really good value for the amount of content that it has. It also has amazing gameplay.
They capture the lore of vampires in an awesome way. There's everything from the first vampire lore to Castlevania. Also if you pay attention the world is alive. monsters fight humans bosses roam the map it is really epic once you start interacting with it. The environments change there are Easter eggs all over the map each area of the rather large map.
The base building is really well implemented and even has a feature where you can move your base and everything in it to a new area with an easy move feature. The gameplay is mostly building up a castle and exploring the land. There are lots of bosses around the map to fight and lots of endgame content with more to come.
This is also a game that is both fun to play alone or with some friends.
It is also important to note that the game is huge already and is about to get even bigger with the patch coming out with 1.1. The already great game is about to be bigger. . . and for free. Awesome devs.
In a ratings system out of ten this game gets a 9.5+. I highly suggest this game. I have almost 60 hours in and I'm about to put in over 60 hours more. The nice thing is once you beat the game on regular mode there's a hardcore mode. There's also and easy mode. . but I'm not too into easy. None the less there's a mode for everyone. IF you want to be in a friendly server there's PVE and if you want more of a challenge and want to fight other players there is PVE servers. IF none of that is quite right you can host your own server on your own computer . . it doesn't take up much resources. . and play the way you want by customising everything in the server to your liking.
An added bonus the community is pretty good and helpful overall.

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.