V Rising

Great game. 9/10 easily. Lots of unique bosses, weapons, areas, and more. Base building is super intuitive as well. Incredible UI and progression mechanics at play. Must play if you love survival games.

V Rising is sort of a finished game. As in, there is sort of progression with sort of endgame with sort of gameplay loop. Up to Gear Level 85ish the game is very solid but then transforms into an utter slog of farming Rifts, rolling secondary bonuses on gems, rolling secondary attributes on legendary weapons. Rift farming feels genuinely soulless, like farming in MMO but without all the things making it fun. Luckily, there are means to modify droprates/vendor prices within in-game settings, but as a game creator, your line of defense should never be "there is a button to skip the part that isn't fun". And mentioning soulless mechanics – servants. They provide no meaningful value to the experience. You catch them, give them gear, and then send them on literal mobile game expeditions. You can’t assign them any meaningful activity. They can’t patrol regions. You can’t take them as your combat companions. You can’t even encounter them in places where you send them to. Half of Vampire appeal is being able to mind control people and create thralls, yet the mechanic is basically non-existent outside of underbaked resource generator. Speaking of dominating people, the other use is keeping prisoners in cages to extract blood from them. For as essential to endgame as “100% Bloods” are, getting them is pain in the back. You either encounter them naturally or play Corrupted Fish minigame where you throw anywhere from one to a few dozens of fish at your prison and see it roll random outcomes until eventually you get 100% Blood. Yet another needless grindy part. Once again, "you can just turn off the part that isn't fun" shouldn't be a line of defense for game designers. The game itself is made with being PVP experience in mind. All the skills, cooldowns, and movement are balanced around players duking it out. Those of you who are familiar with isometric action games may get a heart attack hearing that the base cooldown of dash is 8 seconds. The game tries to compensate for terrible mobility by providing the player with abilities that block/reflect attacks. However, this introduces a design trap in which bosses are balanced around these abilities. If you don’t run Frost Barrier and/or Ward of the Damned, you are at significant disadvantage against most encounters. And in the game where you get 2 non-Ultimate spells total, sacrificing 1 or 2 of your slots for survivability just doesn’t feel exciting or fun. In some encounters, the game effectively taxes you and takes away your ability to play around with its other toys. As far as encounters go - on brutal for the most part, they are fun, with Simon Belmont being the clear peak. However, after him it feels like the game goes downhill fast. The final gauntlet of 5 bosses is homogenic and features very similar dynamics of: avoid bullet hell, spend half the time waiting for your turn, groan when enemy does his mechanic blocking damage or teleports to the other end of arena. Out of these, Adam is probably the most engaging to fight, as his speed is actually matched with the player really well, and the flow of combat feels rather healthy. Either way, after some time, the final bosses don’t even make you angry, they make you numb. They are very flashy, but the more you break them down, the more boring and tiring they become. I don't remember the last time the game made me feel genuine nothing after beating a boss. While V Rising does many things decently and up to a point, there is genuine joy? There are too many questionable choices despite how much work and effort went into the game. If you don’t care much about Vampire/RPG-light/progression part, there are many other choices for slower paced isometric action games on the market.