I Hate Survival Games And I Love V Rising

I’ve been incredibly outspoken on my distaste for survival games in the past. I hate the resource gathering, refining, and the upgrading loop. It’s so infuriating when I need to upgrade a weapon just to find out I need to create a whole ass room for a new type of refining, which in turn takes 10+ hours to produce the resource I need. I hate going out to mine more resources just to realize that I’m out of food or water and have to turn back and wait until the next day.  Don’t even get me started on things like the longhouse building mechanics in Valheim: I’m not a fucking architect, I don’t give a shit about if my ‘load bearing beams’ are in the right place, just let me build my house! Yet, time and time again, I buy these games; Minecraft, ARK, No Man’s Sky, Conan Exiles, Valheim, the list goes on and on. Without fail, I play these games for 45 minutes, get annoyed with the systems, and request a refund on Steam. I understand that these games are incredibly popular, and very good at what they do, they’re just not my cup of tea. I hate them. But I so deeply want to enjoy them that I keep coming back to the next new hotness to see if it will finally scratch that itch that I desperately want to enjoy. You can probably guess what I did when I saw the new ARPG Survival game V Rising… *adds funds to Steam Wallet.*

These are all the things that really kill the survival genre for me. V Rising, on the other hand, hits on a lot of things that I really do like. I love ARPG’s. I’ve put thousands of hours into games like Diablo, Last Epoch, and Path of Exile. It’s kind of a meme at this point, but the ability to diversify how you build your character is a huge allure to me. I love the ability to make a build that is unique to me with interesting and fun mechanics. I love being able to replay content in a totally different way that keeps things fresh. And let me tell you, I love a good skill tree. Like, I LOVE skill trees. 

Valheim was a cultural phenomenon in the gaming space last year, and deservedly so. The systems were deep and complex, the bosses were interesting, and the combat was incredibly engaging. However, at its core, Valheim was still a survival game with good combat. V Rising, on the other hand, brings the combat to the forefront. There are dozens of different powers, weapons, and abilities, all of which can be mixed and matched to fine tune your fighting style and build to your liking. Resource gathering is intuitive and your path to upgrades are really easily spelled out and fighting bosses are incredibly rewarding. It really feels like an ARPG first with incredibly robust survival mechanics under its hood.

The vampirism aspect of V Rising is the superstar of the game, and it is executed perfectly. As you finish the tutorial, and step out into a beautiful, sunny forest, you begin exploring and working on the next step of your mission when suddenly you walk into a grove and BURST INTO FUCKING FLAMES. You quickly realize that you need to stick to the shadows to survive. As you start to progress a bit deeper, and start looting snatching up loot left and right, you’ll come across a ton of different objects without really considering what they are are what their purpose is. You’ll eventually come across Silver Coins. And you’ll say to yourself, ‘yay, currency.’ That is until you immediately start taking damage over time until you take the silver out of your inventory, because vampire. This DoT effect hits even harder the more silver you have on you. Details such as these really nail down the whole ‘surviving as a vampire’, and it’s what makes this game so unique. There are also a number of interesting open world encounters that will make you shit your pants, like walking through the starting area and coming across Level 46 Tristan the Vampire Hunter. He will wreck your ass like it’s his job, and given his name, it probably is. 

Combat and exploration aren’t the only alluring things about V Rising, however. The gathering, crafting, and base-building mechanics are all incredibly intuitive and help ease new players into the world. This area has always been my biggest issue with survival games. The lack of onboarding and transparency makes figuring out how to stay alive from the beginning really difficult. V Rising does a great job of teaching the player exactly how to refine resources, what to do with them, and how to build production to stay alive. The base building system is very intuitive and is incredibly smooth. Though there’s less customization than other titles in the genre (you can’t build multi-level castles, for example) the building and placement system is very easy to use, which I love. It takes away a bit of the ‘chore’ of building and makes it feel more second nature.

From combat, exploration, crafting and more, V Rising has met and surpassed all of my expectations. Given that its an Early Access title, means that it’s only going to get better with each update. As a long time hater of a genre I wanted to love, my itch for a survival game I could really get into has finally been scratched, and I can’t wait to experience more.

V Rising is currently out now for Early Access on Steam.