By Linnie W. Phillips 
Vampires have captured the imagination of most people since Nosferatu first graced the big screen in the early 1900s. Since then, there have been many other films about vampires, as well as novels and even other video games that have managed to capture the horror that this imaginary creature evokes in the psyche of fans around the world. To take advantage of the vampire phenomenon, the publisher/developer Stunlock Studios has developed an experiment that puts the player in the shoes of a vampire who has emerged from a hundred-year sleep and is trying to regain the power and fame that he once possessed. V Rising combines the best of survival, action and RPG genres to create the ultimate vampire adventure.
In V Rising, you play a vampire who woke up after hundreds of years of sleep in the world of vardoren. This long sleep only weakened you and made you extremely bloodthirsty. Your goal at this point is to hunt online alone or with a clan of allies and explore a huge open world of dark horrors while trying to stay alive by dodging the deadly sunlight. As vampire lords are used to, in order to regain their once powerful position in the world, they need to build a powerful castle worthy of their name. This castle will serve as a base for operations or species, and it is up to you to equip it with people who have made you slaves to serve there.
As a vampire with the goal of regaining both your body strength and your group of followers, you will have to carry out a reconstruction campaign to regain the upper hand. You will be tasked with looting villages, looting bandit camps and traversing the territories of supernatural beasts. These activities will allow you to replenish your stocks of building materials, weapons and potential slaves, which you can serve at will. To gain their power, they obviously need to drink their blood to become the biggest predator of all.
You start the game by creating your character using the provided character creation system. You can choose from a variety of ways to create your ultimate vampire by choosing between male or female as well as hairstyle, skin color and even certain accessories like jewelry and sunglasses. Once you are done, immerse yourself in the action, where you will be shown the basics of the game with some tutorials. By completing these tasks, you will get some new weapons, as well as some beginner spells that will help you understand how game systems work. Mastering the controls of the game was a no-brainer and allowed me to jump right in and immediately feel like a vampiric badass.
V Rising’s graphics are awesome and definitely help set the theme and feel of the game from the moment you wake up in your coffin and head out of your crypt into the surrounding forest. The environments are extremely detailed and provide the backdrop for an adventure that is sure to be captivating and very rewarding. You will experience skeletal people, werewolves, zombies, walking tree dwellers, etc. and each of them has been designed with the utmost care. There is also a dynamic day / night cycle that sees you the most at night, but makes you vulnerable to the effects of sunlight during the day. You can move around during the day, but you need to use the shadows if you want to avoid being burned alive.
If you are afraid that you will have to collect decent weapons, do not do this, because there are many that you can discover in the world, or you can just find the parts you need and make one yourself. There is no shortage of supplies and items that you can find in the world to make the ultimate weapon, and the crafting system is really easy to master. The more you use a particular weapon, the stronger it becomes and the more fun it is to send enemies that you might experience. As an evil vampire, you can also cast spells that allow you to be as deadly from a distance as pocket weapons that allow you to be up close. You will learn spells at the beginning of the game by completing the tutorial quests, but soon you will be able to create stronger spells using the spell creation system in the menu.