V Rising

2024-07-28
Played with its default difficulty/server settings V Rising is a game that wants to waste your time. Go punch trees and rocks to build some walls so you can build a furnace so you can smelt the tier one metal then use the weapons from that metal to farm enemies for the mats to build the tier 2 furnace and on and on all while slowly walking across a large map that is mostly repetition with minor differences. Played on a custom server with the drop rate, crafting speed, and player damage maxed it massages most (but not all) of these time wasters leaving a pleasant Blizzard-y Diablo/WoW mish-mash with a basic survival crafting gear tier system. The nods to Blizzard are writ large in the visual design of the entire game, the way bosses play out, and even entire areas like Gloomrot which seem to be ripped straight from the Eastern Plaguelands. This isn't a complaint at all either as it means the core loop of leveling up and fighting new bosses was engaging the entire time I played. That all being said what's left is only really solid and the time wasting along the way is enough that I can't really recommend it unless you're a person who likes a game to kind of grind on mindlessly in the background.