Recent reviews by Saul Goodman, Attorney At Law

TL;DR-
All in all, it has some unique twists for the genre, nails the theme, and has some kinks to work out re: priority system. Looking forward to checking back in on this again later on in Early Access.

The premise of the game is similar to other city management sims: Start from nothing and guide your ragtag troupe of adventurers to fame and fortune and provide a base for your small hamlet to grow into a capital city.

They nailed the medieval growing city tone of the game, with music and the aesthetics of the buildings. Feels REALLY great to zoom in, rotate the camera around, and just see the expanding project develop in real time.

From what I can tell, the main twists they put on the genre are Walls & Farming controls.

Walls are both aesthetic (honestly who doesn't love building walls around a little settlement and just have the aesthetic of a peaceful cottage village surrounded by loose fencing) and functional: they funnel in enemies who occassionally attack the city. At first I was wary of the enemy combat in this game, but it's similar to other city management games, where it basically just functions as another disaster type, and animals in particular respond to where fence gate openings are. Raiders will break through fences if they want to, but seem to prefer going through fence gates, so you can plan ahead and build towers at relavent points.

Farming- this game has a SUPER unique (and frankly, overwhelming) take on farming: Basically there is a custom UI pane that shows up and allows you to cycle in different crops throughout the season, based on different attributes (resistance to frost, heat, planting length, etc.) and it allows you to plan 3 years at a time, at which point it then cycles. There are also soil controls, and you can add sand/clay, which have different effects on different types of crops. Cool stuff, though I will say it's a bit overwhelming and the infographic that they use to teach this is...still very overwhleming (also buggy; at the time of playing this, the information about the different seed types in the seed panel doesn't pop up when you first enter the screen).

My BIG GRIPE with this game is the Priority system. Like many city management games, you don't control the individual characters in your town, but can softly guide them by prioritizing building of certain buildings. It seems to prioritize building things that you have resources for, instead of prioritizing the building you told them to prioritize which you still need to acquire the resources for...So that's not ideal. In addition, harvesting seems completely broken and you have the best results by INDIVIDUALLY CLICKING EACH AND EVERY STONE/TREE to ensure your laborers go out and harvest those; that's so eggregious, imo, that it has to be a bug and not a feature, because holy ♥♥♥♥ that's painful as a user.

All in all, it has some unique twists for the genre, nails the theme, and has some kinks to work out re: priority system. Looking forward to checking back in on this again later on in Early Access.

If the fantasy goal of this game is to "Become a Vampire Lord", then this game nails it. The two aspects of this are being the "Vampire" (combat & RPG mechanics) and the "Lord" (survival/building mechanics).

On the "Lord" side of this, compared to other survival games, V Rising definitely adds a ton of QoL features (really long durability, really forgiving base decay with essences lasting for a ton of hours, no weight tracking). All of this prevents the phenomena of a lot of survival games (which some love, some don't ) where in order to acquire resources, you have to sometimes bring multiple pickaxes, and possibly end a supply run short because you're low on weight. V Rising makes the supply run loop way more accessible and forgiving compared to other games. This in turn allows base building to feel relatively simple (though of course, the deeper you want to go into the aesthetics tree, the more you will have to grind for resources). Once you get the patterns done, it takes maybe 30-60 minutes to get a cool Vampire style castle up and running, which is super super feels good and hits the "Lord" side very effectively, due to the supply runs being more accessible.

On the "Vampire" side of the fantasy, the combat evokes a feeling that you ARE this badass vampire. The execute mechanic & blood draining mechanics especially enhance this. Blood Draining & Types is one of the unique RPG elements to this game, which I won't go into super detail- Alls I will say is that it definitely builds up the Vampire fantasy because basically you're incentivized to suck everyone's blood and feel like a badass. The execute mechanic especially feels SUPER snappy, which definitely evokes the feeling of being this "scary monster of the night" vibe, because you literally turn into an untargettable shadow, zip all over the place, then execute and kill the NPC. Feels great. Also, the Blood Tracking aspect where you hunt Named NPCs in the world to take their skills also evokes the sort of "I take your blood and your powers" which also hits the "Vampire" fantasy.

All in all, this is a great and well founded early access game. Can't wait to see where they go with it next.

Blown away by the quality of the experience. I was definitely skeptical it wouldn't hold up to the first game at the start, and there's always work to do re: bugs and whatnot, but this was an amazing experience, especially in the second half of the narrative.

The new traversal systems enhance parkour & certain combat encounters in ways that surpass the feeling of fast combat in the first game.

There are definitely bugs, and some questionable sequences of the main quest line (like in the Raid where you have several consecutive conversations with people when it could all be one conversation), and some QoL features that could certainly be added later.

Looking forward to NG+ and the further support that they will add for this game.

Solid 8.5/10 Experience, 9.3/10 if you're into league of legends lore/world building

Quick Abilities + Lane Abilities division reminds me of card game mechanics, so that’s a way to learn/get used to the difference. Ties into the combat ordering pretty well and is relatively straight forward
Lane abilities affecting combat power + combat ordering makes sense. I will say, early on, there doesn’t seem to be THAT much benefit to it yet, but that comes later, especially on higher difficulties.

I guess also a big thing is that Wildcards (Hazards/Boons) play around the combat ordering- so you want to like- avoid them with differently timed abilities.

I do wish it was a bit more clear for when I plan an ability if it’s in a hazard or boon.

LOOOVE Dungeon abilities. It’s not just the damage, but the fact that it like, sets up things like Illaoi’s passive to start combat with 1 tentacle. It’s also an excellent like, opportunities to display skill mastery (albeit, twitch skill which isn’t the primary focus here but eh it’s fine). Super Neato.