I have many opinions about Early Access games. Nearly as many as there are EA games in fact! I would say that in most cases, EA games are interesting incubation projects and investment in that space is solely related to my desire to help a small dev team try out an idea. I am far from an angel investor, as my only return is the ability to experience that idea (and maybe, maybe, influence it). Then there are outliers, horrid ones and beautiful ones. For every Valheim there are a thousand or more bad apples. How many Stardew Valley clones do we need?

V Rising is much more like Valheim in terms of getting the essence of genres down together, in this case survival + ARPG. First and importantly, both of those genres are notoriously complex to balance. Survival is just… it’s having a moment. The concept of building things, then using those things to collect more things to build more things, all while not dying is the rage. Finding the balance between reward and challenge is the hurdle. Things like Rust where you can lose dozens of hours of progress, well that just plain sucks. Others like Enshrouded where it just rains power, maybe a bit less so. ARPGs well, that is all about the flow of moment to moment battles. If it isn’t responsive, if you can’t make out heads or tails of what’s going on, then it just doesn’t work. Where survival and ARPGs intersect is the idea of RNG loot. You can’t just get lucky and get a god sword in a survival game, it would break everything.

V Rising has found a way to balance both, where your survival and power is gated through progress on bosses. Each boss increases in difficulty (as does the area of the world in which they reside), providing more crafting options and therefore more power options. You’ll get new spells, new modifications, new weapons, new armor, new minions. It generally works. It absolutely shines as a co-op PvE game. It has the construct of PvP games (I am avoiding that altogether, for reasons). As a solo game, there are periods of very high frustration, primarily due to the lack of scaling based on number of players. That effectively means that some boss fights can go on for quite a while as a battle of attrition, as the power curve is almost always putting you at a disadvantage. With very few exceptions, each boss takes multiple attempts until you figure out their mechanics. Some take many more attempts. Some are frankly walls due to tuning, or perhaps a very clear reminder that this game is meant for 2 or more players on a boss.

Two parts to that. First, each boss has a clearly indicated power ranking. You have one as well, based on equipped gear. Improved gear comes from killing bosses and unlocking crafting options, or somehow you get RNGsus to bless you with a random recipe (that you likely cannot make due to crafting options). The end result is that you’re nearly always 5 or so power behind in each fight. But 5 you say, that’s a small number! Each point your are below, you deal 4% less damage and take 4% more, so that’s a 20% penalty both ways. Second is the environment. Some bosses are solitary, some are not. Some patrol. Some are inside or outside. No two battlefields are the same, so mechanically you are fighting the environment (and sun = death here) as much as the boss itself. This has a net effect of every boss being substantially different which is an amazing experience!

Combat mechanics are solid. A bunch of weapons, each with strengths and weaknesses that fit your style. There are a ton of spells, though I’d argue few have much use outside of niche situations. For the most part, an offense spell and defense (shield) spell are core. It takes a long time to figure out how healing can be integrated into your gameplay. This is a game that rewards tactics and drastically punishes brute force.

I think the castle building portion is extremely well done. You feel like you have a lair with flair. The progression of the various mechanical bits sort of works, but you end up with a tad too many machines for my likes, which makes the castle have a much more practical approach. The game plays on a Steam Deck, or a controller. Both put you at a serious disadvantage in complex combat due to the way the camera works and how some spells need to be lead, which is infinitely faster and more accurate with a mouse. One boss in particular was 20 failures on the Steam Deck, then a first attempt clear on the PC.

The game has a very rudimentary teleporting function, with about 10 gates strewn about a fairly large map. Rudimentary in the context of 75% of the items you can collect cannot be teleported, meaning long treks back to base. I get this construct in the first couple zones. It doesn’t impact corpse runs, so this is just the huffing-it-back-to-base part. Sure, you can move your base – which is a simple item to trigger, but honestly 30+mins to put everything back in place – but why? I’d strongly recommend that in the server setting options you allow teleporting with all items. Trust me, you’ll spend MORE than enough time corpse running, you won’t need it for farming too! That said, if you want to travel faster, find a horse with 10+ speed, and 6+ acceleration.

Overall, V Rising is a rather interesting game and one that successfully navigated the Early Access quagmire to come out well ahead. The game manages to blend two complex gaming genres into something that is smooth, enjoyable, and challenging. If you can play co-op, then you’re going to have a blast! Solo work, expect a fair chunk of challenge throughout. A few more thoughts to share on this coming…