Family Guide to V Rising
V Rising is a survival adventure game about vampires. It's currently available on PC in early access and has become really popular in recent weeks.
You wake as a weak vampire and must hunt for blood while evading the sun to slowly rebuild your castle. This is played out in a living open world full of mystery. Gain allies online and conquer the land of the living.
Play involves exploring the large world that's full of mythical horrors and dangers. From an overhead perspective, you guide your vampire through lush forests, open countryside, and dark caverns to pillage villages, raid bandits, and delve into the domains of supernatural beasts. Combat encounters aren't controlled by clicking but instead by controlling your characters with keys.
All the time you need to be careful to stay in the shadows to avoid damage from the burning sunlight. You are safer at night but still, have to work to quench your thirst for blood. It's a well-known aspect of vampires, of course, but here it's put to good use so you must plan your strategies around the day and nighttime.
As you gather resources and techniques you build a castle to store the loot and grow your army. This becomes your home domain that you can customise as you want. Over time you steadily strengthen your castle to protect your treasure hoard from vampire rivals.
You can play offline. But it's more fun to go online with friends, fighting with them to take on other teams and possibly even get into and steal from their castles. Either way, you acquire and develop weapons and unholy abilities. This lets you slowly tailor your vampire to fit your play style by combining weapons and spells.
Age Rating
As this is on PC it has not yet got a PEGI rating. We played the game to test it out for families.
The game includes horror themes with supernatural beasts. You lure innocent victims back to your castle to drink their blood and turn them into undead warriors. There is also violence with splashes and splatters of blood when you hit enemies. When players are out of energy they kneel down in a pool of blood waiting to be revived. When enemies die they collapse on the floor and stay in the game.
You need an account to play online play. This has an 18 years old as minimum age. From the game EULA, players must be "the age of majority and have the legal capacity to enter into a contract in the jurisdiction where they reside." In the US and Europe this is 18 years old. It also states that players must be over 13, but this is superseded in most countries by the age of majority requirement.
Online Play
You can play this by yourself or as a 10-player online game. You can play online cooperatively. Your friends can join you to help and take on other teams. This leads to raids of other player's castles.
You can communicate with other players with text or voice chat. Text chat is Global to the whole server or Local to your team. Voice chat lets you talk to those nearby in the game. You can disable Voice chat via the settings.
Alternatives
These games are good alternatives to V Rising if the themes are too mature for you:
Grounded (PEGI 12)
Sea of Thieves (PEGI 12)
Ark Survival Evolved (PEGI 16)
Rust (PEGI 16)
