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Being a vampire slaps harder than your undead fist through an Inquisitor’s skull: immortality, super strength, flight! Sure, you’re allergic to sunlight and your diet’s exclusively liquid, but you get superpowers. What could possibly improve this deal? How about your own vampire castle, that’s what.
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising drops you as Dragos, acolyte of an extremely powerful vampire who got extinguished by the Inquisition centuries (maybe? I’m not sure) ago. Long after this catastrophic event, you wake up to your master’s voice echoing through the ruins, demanding you rebuild his kingdom from ash. Your main job? Demolish the crumbling remains of his castle and construct whatever your undead heart desires around the “core” that protects you from “the veil.” I know, a bunch of words that don’t actually matter unless you’re elbow-deep in the game’s mechanics, but stick with me because this leads us to the main attraction: base building that will absolutely devour your life.
Base building in Vampires: Bloodlord Rising is pure, uncut dopamine. Initially the game throws plots at you, free other lands, complete quests, rebuild strongholds scattered across the map, but I consistently found myself wasting entire days (or rather, nights, because vampire) obsessing over making my gothic cathedral castle absolutely perfect. The customization options are legitimately impressive: multiple wall types, floor patterns, roof tiles, decorative elements, and architectural flourishes to transform your stronghold into whatever vision your immortal brain conjures.
I spent literal hours, we’re talking 10+ easily, just staring at my castle’s roof trying to determine which pattern worked best for the beauty I was constructing. Should I go full traditional gothic with the pointed arches? Mix in some baroque flourishes? The paralysis is real, folks. One moment you’re placing a few walls, next thing you know the sun’s coming up (bad for vampires) and you’ve redesigned your entire east wing three times because the symmetry felt wrong.
There are some minor frustrations though: certain floor tiles leave awkward gaps between each other no matter how you place them, and different wall types can’t always be pattern-matched (you get similar designs but not identical ones) which drives my perfectionist brain insane. But these are small grievances in early access, and I’ve already noticed the devs squashing bugs faster than I’m draining village peasants, so I’m confident these will get ironed out before full release.
Either way, I hope you enjoy the screenshots of my very unfinished vampire cathedral scattered throughout this review, because I’m genuinely proud of this gothic monstrosity. My only real complaint, and please listen here, devs, is that I can’t sit on my throne. What is the actual point of having the most expensive, ornate throne in the game presiding over your castle’s core if your vampire ass can’t physically park itself there? This is a betrayal of the highest order. Fix this immediately or face my wrath.
To build this architectural fever dream, you need resources. Lots of them. But unlike other base building games where half your playtime involves mindlessly hitting rocks with pickaxes to get… slightly different rocks, Vampires: Bloodlord Rising remembers you’re a goddamn vampire. Which means resource nodes explode in one hit and dump hundreds of materials into your inventory within seconds. This single design choice makes building and gathering exponentially more relaxing than genre competitors that treat resource grinding like a second job.
Better yet, you command little vampire servants who gather and refine resources automatically. Everything can be automated once you set up the proper systems, freeing you to focus on the fun stuff like obsessing over roof patterns for three hours straight. However, the automation has room for improvement in two critical areas:
First, let me use resources directly from the shared chest without manually extracting them. This is industry standard in 2026, games figured this out years ago. Having to run to the chest, pull out materials, then craft feels like artificial busywork nobody asked for.
Second, let me set specific craft quantities for my servants. Right now if you tell them to make armor, they’ll burn through every single resource in your storage making infinite copies until you manually stop them. I don’t need forty Guardian Armors, I need one. This forces tedious micromanagement that defeats the entire purpose of automation. Both these fixes would transform the building economy from “pretty good” to “absolutely seamless.”
The world is medium-sized and surprisingly dense with secrets if you’re willing to poke around. Exploration mainly revolves around finding three collectible types scattered across the landscape: vampire tears (essentially ability points for unlocking powers), skill books (permanent stat boosts for various abilities), and armor pieces hidden in chests or guarded locations.
Early exploration honestly drags because you’re ground-bound, slowly trudging between points of interest while avoiding Inquisition camps. But here’s the thing, I made absolutely sure to collect enough vampire tears to unlock my first major ability: transforming into a bat. The moment I got flight? Game changer. I zoomed across the entire map in seconds, exploring every corner, nook, and hidden valley on my own terms while completely avoiding most Inquisition encounters. Flying trivializes exploration in the best possible way, letting you engage with the world at your preferred pace instead of forcing tedious walking simulator segments.
That said, exploration could use more variety beyond tears/books/armor. Maybe hidden lore tablets about your master’s fall? Secret vampire hideouts with unique furniture blueprints? Environmental storytelling through ruined structures? There’s a few of these but no actual reason to visit them. The foundation is solid but adding more discovery types would keep exploration engaging even after you’ve collected the obvious stuff.
The main enemies, currently the only enemies, are the Inquisition. Their camps litter the map, armed patrols hunt you if villagers raise alarms, and they periodically launch raids on your secondary strongholds in conquered lands. In theory, this creates constant tension between building peacefully and dealing with religious zealots determined to end your unlife.
In practice, combat in Vampires: Bloodlord Rising is exactly what you’d expect from a base building game: bad. You’ve got two attacks: light and charged. Yellow prompt over an enemy means you can counter their attack. Red prompt means you must dodge or eat damage. Simple enough, right? Wrong, because here’s where my primary frustration erupted like an Inquisitor’s exploding skull.
When you tap dodge, you don’t get invincibility frames during the animation. You’d think after 15 years of Dark Souls teaching the entire industry how dodge mechanics should function, developers would understand this basic principle. Instead, you have to physically dodge out of an attack’s hitbox, but the combat controls are clunkier than a freshly-woken vampire stumbling out of his coffin. I constantly found myself dodging into the enemy I was fighting, getting stuck on their character model and blocking my movement, which resulted in eating heavy hits I swore I’d avoided.
There’s also a rage mechanic where landing hits builds a meter, and once full you can execute enemies instantly by pressing attack and counter buttons simultaneously. Sounds cool until you realize how easy it is to fumble the timing. Miss the precise window? You get locked into the counter animation for several seconds while that red attack, the one that was supposed to end with your enemy’s agonized screams, slams directly into your face and ends your fight. Multiple times I had victories ripped away because the input detection failed and left me vulnerable during the most crucial moment.
Here’s my advice to make combat drastically more enjoyable: Give us dodge i-frames and add a separate execution button. That’s it. Two changes. I promise if I lose after you implement these, I can only blame my own failures instead of fighting the controls harder than I’m fighting actual enemies.
The whole Inquisition and combat section feels tacked-on, like it was added because “base building games need enemies” without considering how to integrate them meaningfully. There’s even a half-baked mechanic where clearing Inquisition camps triggers notifications that their “presence has lessened in the region.” What does that mean practically? Absolutely nothing, they respawn in those exact camps the next night like nothing changed.
Maybe add a system where Inquisition strength actually matters? Let them raid your main castle if their presence gets too high, creating actual stakes beyond “minor nuisance during exploration.” Right now they’re glorified speedbumps you avoid with bat form or mow down if they’re blocking a collectible. They need either mechanical depth or narrative weight, because currently they’re just filler padding out exploration segments.
Regular humans, the NPCs populating villages, desperately need work. They’re just… boring. Lifeless. Right now your interaction consists of talking to them and gossiping about their neighbors, which reveals a maximum of three skill hints if you’re considering turning them into vampire servants. That’s the entire depth of human interaction: gossip, maybe convert, or drain their blood (which kills them and lowers your daily tax income, making it pointless).
Personally, I think giving villagers a handful of side quests that improve town prosperity would massively boost immersion. And no, I’m not talking about fetch quests, “bring me 10 rat tails” can die in a fire. I mean meaningful interactions that make the village feel alive and reactive to your presence. Because right now villagers are relatively aimless automatons walking circles at 3 AM for no discernible reason.
Speaking of which: why are 30 people wandering the streets at 4 AM just… praying? Make NPCs disappear as night deepens. Have them go home, lock doors, sleep like actual humans instead of treating the village square like a 24-hour religious vigil. Small touches like this would transform the village from obvious video game set dressing into a living, breathing community worth protecting (or terrorizing, depending on your moral alignment).
Look, I know I rambled toward the end there, but Vampires: Bloodlord Rising has serious potential despite its rough edges. The base building is genuinely exquisite and will absolutely steal too many hours from your life if you let it. Combat has potential if devs polish the mechanics and give it meaningful integration with the broader gameplay loop. Exploration is quite fun once you unlock flight, though it could use additional discovery types beyond the current trinity.
All in all, I had a legitimately great time with this early access title and I’m excited to see how much further it develops. The foundation is rock-solid, devs clearly understand what makes base building addictive, they just need to smooth the systems surrounding it. Even in this unfinished state, with clunky combat and lifeless NPCs, I’d recommend Vampires: Bloodlord Rising to anyone who’s ever fantasized about building their perfect gothic castle while occasionally terrorizing medieval peasants.
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Early Access
Bottom Line
Exceptional base-building game trapped inside mediocre action RPG. Clunky combat and lifeless NPCs can't ruin the addictive castle construction that will steal your life. Perfect for architecture obsessives who'd rather debate roof tiles than fight Inquisitors. Rough early access edges, but the core loop slaps hard enough to recommend. A great starting point, let's see where it gets by the end of EA.
