V Rising review: Good game, awful timing

When V Rising launched in early access two years ago it peaked with 150k concurrent Steam players, making it one of the biggest survival crafting successes of the year. V Rising finally dropped the early access moniker in May 2024, and now that full experience is available for PS5 players to enjoy. Only, since V Rising, we’ve had Nightingale, Soulmask, Palworld, Enshrouded – in fact, those are just the survival crafting games that have launched in 2024 alone. This genre has quickly become oversaturated – it demands hours of your time to make progress, the early hours are borderline identical across the genre, and only a slim few manage to actually stand out. Going back to V Rising now, even in its fully completed state, I have to ask: why was this such a hit? It must’ve been a right place, right time situation, because V Rising isn’t much to write home about – or, on the internet about. It’s an isometric top-down action game with spells on cooldowns – a lot like Diablo – except everything you do revolves aro