V Rising PS5 review

V Rising on PS5 is a game that focuses heavily on the power fantasy of being a vampire. This isn’t a title that sees you skulking about trying to seduce people or avoid wooden-stake heart surgery; rather, V Rising wants you to become a super powerful undead badass with a castle to match – which is partly why it feels so refreshing and addictive to play.

It begins with you waking up in your crypt, shaking a few centuries of dirt out of your ragged underpants and embarking on a quest for world domination like being dead for several hundred years ain’t no thing. As you fight your way through the graveyard killing skeletons and zombies, and swiping rats for nourishment, you’ll learn the basics.

V Rising opens up very gradually early on. Gather some bones and you can craft a sword, a few more and you can bind them together with rat hair and spit to make some rudimentary armour. Then you’ll start to harvest wood, hide, copper, stone, and with each milestone reached you’ll gain new crafting recipes. Eventually you’ll be given a choice of where to place your Castle Heart, which forms the basis for your halls of residence. Just don’t do what I did and accidentally place it in a high level area, or you’ll be stuck kiting a giant spider round your front lawn every time you go out to get the paper.

Once the Castle Heart is placed, you power it with Blood Orbs that drop from pretty much everything you kill, which in turn allows you to build and power industrial tools like a sawmill and forge. The onus here is on growing one’s stature, until one is essentially a vampire god with a massive castle and a massive collar, ready to take on the world. Played solo it’s essentially an isometric action-RPG with survival elements, but if you opt to play on a PvP server you’ll be contending with other vampires invading your castle and stealing your loot.

Either way it won’t be long before you’re heading off to hunt down special targets, either powerful beasts or elite vampire hunters and bandits who will yield unique crafting recipes and materials. A handy blood trail makes it easy to track them, and you’ll develop special bonuses based on which type of blood you drink on the way, increasing attacks speed or damage mitigation. After a while, you can even shapeshift into animal forms for faster travel.

Getting caught out in the sun can be lethal, necessitating a corpse run to pick up whatever you were carrying when you were barbecued, but getting back to your castle when the sun is up can also be a lot of fun. You can survive if you stick to the shadows, so picking your way back from shade to shade from one end of the map to the other can be quite enjoyable.

My only issue with V Rising on PS5 is the same one I had with the PC version, and it’s that the controls just aren’t tuned right. You can’t adjust the controls yourself other than choosing one of two layouts, and neither is great. Why the camera couldn’t just be on the right stick like any other game is beyond me, and once you unlock multiple weapons with their own attacks to add to your growing litany of spells the controls can become a little cumbersome.

It’s doubly weird as you can customise everything else to an enormous degree. Not just your castle, either, although you can build them six-stories high and unlock multiple themed items and building pieces – but the game itself. You can go into the server menu and adjust everything from how long a day lasts to what level you start at, and how many resources you can carry. There’s a slider for almost everything to the point that you can either trivialise the difficulty completely or make it impossible to survive.

The PS5 version of V Rising is just as playable and compelling as the PC version, and you absolutely should play one or the other if possible. It’s a fantastic game that really leans into that power fantasy I mentioned, allowing you to construct an enormous citadel in the forest and strike terror into anything that wanders too close. And if you’re the sort who enjoys violence against your fellow bloodsucker, the PvP servers will keep you satisfied. Or you could team up, of course – but where’s the fun in that? Whatever your preferred method of vamping it up, V Rising on PS5 has something to keep you well sated.