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The central gameplay loop of V Rising is pretty interesting and satisfying: acquire resources, upgrade your gear and castle, hunt new bosses to unlock new spells, abilities, forms, and recipes, and repeat. If you're willing to tolerate a grind or want to play offline with custom settings that reduce the grind, you'll enjoy the gameplay.
Some have likened it to Diablo or PoE. Given that it's WASD, I'm not sure I really see the comparison-- the combat is a little more technical and skillful than most ARPGs. The bosses usually require good timing and footwork and a focus on mitigating your own greed if you're properly/under-leveled. It's more like a Hades or Heroes of Hammerwatch type game minus the roguelike run-based upgrades. You have abilities on cooldown, like D2 or D3, but precision and timing matter, unlike D2, D3, or the first 90 hours of PoE. I love D2, but the difficulty is much more gear-based than skill-based. Most of my buddies are struggling with the late game bosses while gently overleveled. The first several bosses will be rather easy if you're familiar with Dark Souls type patience, but the latter bosses become genuinely interesting and require some practice and planning to take down. They're easily the best part of the game.
V Rising is entertaining, but you need to understand that a given playthrough (in online or on default server settings) is 90% grind and 10% gameplay.
The first 10 hours of a playthrough communicate this poorly: they're consistently fun. You're upgrading your gear and abilities with solid pacing, and it takes an hour or less to acquire the resources you need to upgrade that gear once you unlock the needed recipes. Each time you acquire a new ability, it's fairly likely you'll feel significantly more powerful and more able to collect the resources you like without worrying about the ads guarding them. The most frustrating grind during this stage of play is acquiring enough stone and wood to wall in your castle to maintain a decent little workshop while keeping out the sunlight. Eventually, each tier upgrade for loot is much grindier than this.
Once you're about 20 hours in, you have some of, if not THE, best abilities in the game. Bosses, at that point, essentially only guard recipes. Once you get to the second-to-last tier of weapons and armor, the resource grind slows to a halt. You have to run the most efficient routes for hours to outfit yourself, much less a team. The novelty and excitement of getting what were previously rare items totally fades by the time you finally get a tiny stat upgrade. Most of my friends lost interest here, and I was left playing the game largely solo. It's fair to say that a good number of people that would have enjoyed this game if it were setup like a roguelike became sick of the grind:boss fight ratio. When the progression still feels fun, the bosses will be a bit underwhelming. When the bosses start getting fun, the progression feels underwhelming (grind! Are you tallying how many times I've said the word yet?).
I think that grindy games are fun if you spend no more than half of your playtime grinding, and if that grinding presents varied areas, enemies, and experiences that are roughly equally viable. This isn't that. There's often 1 or 2 areas that are by far the best for acquiring your most needed resource, leading either to boring repetitiveness or acceptance of subpar farming routes in a game that demands a bunch of farming. The scourgestone/dark silver grind is really frustrating, especially because the end game forge requires the equivalent of 3 tool's/weapon's worth of it before you can actually make the tools/weapons. You'll run the Haunted Forest and Dunley Monastery a dozen times to get what you need. You'll be able to farm these areas like the back of your hand. The challenge, novelty, and intrigue will be gone.
On the business side, it seems Stunlock isn't really to be trusted as a developer, either. They've abandoned 2 different Early Access titles already, and they've added expensive "supporter" DLCs to this game without having released a major update in 10 months. This is good news in that old guides still apply if you're looking to learn the optimal routes and strategies in this game. This is bad news if you're expecting this game to become much more than it already is. At the very least, this game is already well worth $20 as it stands.
Pros:
-Satisfying combat with gradually more challenging bosses
-Good upgrade system tied to gear instead of XP (somebody else can grind for you if you don't have time and just wanna do the fun parts)
-Starts out feeling like a Souls title in combat
-Ends up making you feel incredibly powerful with proper cooldown management in combat
-New animal forms to help you navigate the map
-Castle offers more and more functionality
-Lets you run your own server with custom settings to tweak resource and combat difficulty
-Servants can farm a little for you while you're offline
Cons:
-While you do unlock new mechanics to mitigate grind, perfectly using all of them still leaves you feeling slower to acquire resources than you were in the first 10 hours
-Eventually, entire play sessions will be spent grinding. Is the combat fun enough for you to offset this?
-Unlikely to receive many major updates
-If your friends are reasonable, responsible, employed adults, they'll lose interest
-Bosses are much more fun solo than with friends even though this is a multiplayer-focused game
-Can't fast travel while carrying anything important, and you'll travel to the same areas over and over and over. Game would still be painfully grindy if you could fast travel anywhere you wanted anytime you wanted, so it adds insult to injury.
-Game promises you a bat form only to reveal you can't use it while carrying anything important, making it worse than the teleportation network available at the beginning of the game in most scenarios
-Failing to plan around the day/night cycle can result in boss/grinding attempts interrupted or postponed
-Have to log on consistently to make the most of your servants
-Ideal castle locations will be overcrowded on online. You'll have to build yours in butthole town, approximately seven years from all your ideal farming spots.
My suggestion? Pick this game up. The best moments are too entertaining to pass up what it already offers for $20. But don't play online. Play a private server with custom settings with friends or solo. Make resources twice as abundant and recipes half as expensive (Honestly? Maybe even make recipes a third or fourth as expensive). Don't touch combat difficulty (make it harder if you're on a 2nd playthrough or perfectionistic: some of these bosses are so well-designed that they're worth learning to no-hit). Enable the fast travel network to be always active, even if you're carrying "cannot be teleported" items (maybe put this one off for a second playthrough if you love the feeling of exploration). If you really must play it in its full, grindy glory, your second playthrough will always be waiting for you.