Vampires: Bloodlord Rising is a dark, open world RPG adventure where you play as a newly awakened vampire lore with a vengeance. Read our review of its early-access build to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Everything We Know About Vampires: Bloodlord Rising
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Plot
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising follows the story of Dragos, a long-slumbering vampire awakened by the voice of his former master, Vorago, that has given him an ambitious task of reviving their cause and to let vampires run the land once again. Players start at the very beginning with a weakened Dragos with nothing left to his name, and must spread their influence and power over the lands as they slowly reclaim what used to be theirs.
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Gameplay
Waking up after decades of sleep as a vampire, players take on the monumental task of restoring his master’s lost vampire lord legacy. From rebuilding the ruined castle and weakening the hold of the poisonous Silver Veil, to feeding and creating vampire servants while fighting the hostile Inquisition, the journey to reclaiming the vampire’s former glory is treacherous, but worth it.
Gameplay contains base-building and resource management elements, as well as RPG mechanics such as open world exploration and combat.
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Release Date
Released on January 30, 2026, Vampires: Bloodlord Rising is now available to be purchased in Early Access on Steam for $19.99. Developers Mehuman Games projects the Early Access phase to last for 12 months before releasing in 1.0.
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 Steam |
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| $19.99 |
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Review [Early Access]
The Bloodlord Hasn't Risen Yet
Vampires and vampire fantasies have always been a mainstay in all kinds of media, and video games are no exception. The Vampire: The Masquerade series (special shout out to Bloodhunt, RIP), Vampyr, Vampire Survivors, the Legacy of Kain, even as far back as the long-standing Castlevania series—the list goes on. I’m no particular vampire fanatic, but the idea of playing as these powerful bloodsuckers with extraordinary powers has always been appealing.
One of my absolute favorite vampire-themed games is V Rising, a survival action RPG that I’ve sunk more than just a few hours into. It's polished, fun, engaging—it definitely earned its laurels even before its full release in 2025, with tens of thousands of people living their vampire lord legacy. Seeing as Vampires: Bloodlord Rising was similar in scope but this time in 3D (V Rising is played top-down like a CRPG), it was natural I’d be interested in it.
It’s impossible to not compare this game to V Rising—heck, they even have similar sounding names. It’s got a long way to go to even feel as 1/4th polished as V Rising, but Vampires: Bloodlord Rising does have a basic foundation of things, and hopefully the developers deliver over the next few months.
Becoming the Vampire Lord of Sangavia
You take on the reins of Dragos, a vampire who has awakened from his decades of slumber by the disembodied voice of his master, vampire lord Vorago. Dragos, along with his brother Razvan and vampire bloodkin Reveka and Malus, are the only vampires left in the land of medieval Sangavia after an Inquisition raid years ago annihilated most of their kind.
Their master’s voice bids him to revive their legacy and their power by retaking the Castle and their fallen Strongholds scattered around the land. Doing so will weaken the Silver Veil, a spell that keeps vampirekind at bay. Once the Silver Veil has been eradicated, the vampires will rise once again…or so they hope.
This ambitious goal will definitely be a difficult task to undertake—Dragos’s powers lay dormant after years of stasis, no servants, no base, and the Inquisition has staked their claim in every inch of Sangavia. However, that is where you, the player, step in and make sure that everything goes according to plan. Fight, claim, build, and reign over the land once again.
Story-wise, it’s decent. It’s nothing you haven’t heard of before and is pretty straightforward in its premise. The characters are a pretty fun bunch themselves too, each with their own backstory and lore that ties them into the greater scheme of things. Just don’t expect anything mindblowing. It’s also quite short for a main story, but then again, this game’s just in Early Access. Perhaps there will be more lands to conquer later on.
Building The Vampire Dominion Piece By Piece
Gameplay in Vampires: Bloodlord Rising mainly revolves around base-building and resource management, with a side of combat and exploration. Dragos must establish his influence through several different ways, as well as enlist the help of his contemporaries who have gone into hiding.
First, the Castle Core and the main base on Castle Hill must be rebuilt. This serves as the main base of operations as well, where all the crafting, gathering, and more happen. You build the castle piece by piece (quite literally), growing in size and power. To further your vampiric dominion ambitions, the Silver Veil must be weakened, and this can only be done by supplying a healthy amount of blood to the Castle Core.
To make things easier, you can (forcefully) enlist the help of the unsuspecting villagers. With a bit of secret neck-biting tactics, you can make them your loyal indentured servants that can build castle walls and furniture, protect Strongholds, hunt for blood, craft items, gather materials, and more. How do you do this, you ask? You take on your noble, human aristocrat form in front of them, then strike at them with your vampire hunter form when they least expect it. Some stealth gameplay lodged in there too.
While they’re taking care of things over base-side, Dragos can slowly whittle away at the Inquisition army’s forces in Sangavia by taking down their men and retrieving small bits of power called Vampire Tears that they have stored around in their camps (as a battle trophy, I guess). These tears can be used to give Dragos more skills and upgrades, such as expanding his Blood and Existence pool, acquiring abilities like turning into a bat, and more.
There is quite a lot to do in the game even at its current state, providing at least 10 hours of gameplay, even more if you’re deep into the abyss that is base-building. However, the game suffers from several technical lapses across the board that can make or break the gameplay experience.
Clunky Combat Controls
Firstly, outside of exploration, controls do feel awkward and are clunky. They’re not intuitive, and feel too heavy—not in a good way that it feels substantial, but rather slow. Combat is definitely difficult—atrocious controls don’t make for a good battle experience, and it doesn’t help that you’ll always get jumped by a handful of Inquisitors no matter what you do. No matter how good you are at timing, the controls will just not cooperate 100%. This looks to be because of the swinging animations when attacking—Dragos appears to need to finish his falcon punch (swing?) before executing anything else. I guess that’s good in immersion, but bad in execution.
You’ll be lucky if the counterattack (right mouse button) or the vampire-style dodge (quick tap Shift) actually registers. Sometimes, there’ll be two NPCs attacking at the same time too, so even if you manage to counter or dodge one of them, another one will have a perfectly timed bash or stab on the other side to damage you anyway.
Luckily enough, Inquisitors don’t respawn immediately if you perish in battle and come back, so you can slowly pick them out…one by one if you have the patience to do so. Fight, die, respawn, repeat the cycle.
And because of how frustrating combat can be, I prefer to avoid conflict unless needed. Honestly, it feels like the devs are pretty aware of the difficult combat since the mausoleums (respawn points) are conveniently almost everywhere so it’s not hard to get back on track—just incredibly tedious.
Building Is A Chore
In relation to the above point, building controls and mechanics are just as frustrating. For example, the snapping of the individual parts can be hard to deal with, most evident when you start building the second floor of your castle. There’s no bird’s eye view (er, bat’s eye view) to help you, and alongside the clunky controls, building is easier said than done. Fixing walls and roofs higher up is harder than it should be. And come on—I’m a vampire in this game! I innately have the ability to fly (if you unlock it, that is).
Moreover, another thing I find particularly daunting is that there’s no option to change the wallpaper or material of your walls all in one go. If you suddenly decide that you want to change the look of your sprawling two-story mansion…well, you’ll be taking a bit of time running around the entire perimeter.
And let’s be real—why is there no option to freely move structures? If you misplaced a crafting table or a wall, you need to destroy it then rebuild it again. For a game whose base-building progression and furniture unlockables relies on adding more built structures to the castle (e.g. you start off with a Noble’s Castle "rank", then upgrade to a Baron’s Castle once you reach 250 items, and so on), there will always be remodelling to do at any time.
It’s a mild annoyance for building walls and whatnot, but doubly frustrating for the worker stations. With no option to move them, you’d need to demolish them, which will reset the vampire assignment for that table. Initially you’ll only have two vampires, but imagine how tedious that process is for multiple vampire servants. Destroy, rebuild, reassign, rinse, repeat cycle until everything’s back to normal. This is not the way to go.
Visual Janks Here And There
On that note, visuals—character design wise and world-building wise—look decent and serve its purpose of adding more life to the game. However, it’s bogged down by obvious stutters and jank, even on low-medium settings. Sometimes, it even locks down onto 30FPS all of a sudden, particularly after awakening in a coffin.
Assets tend to clip over one another, such as floating rocks or floating lampposts. Moreover, while it’s technically a jank on the gameplay side of things, it’s still something visual—enemy Inquisitors do sometimes spawn…underground. Dragos’ special scanning skill can pick up on them and highlight their positions. It’s quite amusing to hear a disembodied voice screaming at you in the name of the Eternal Mother while their body is stuck somewhere six feet underground.
Animations could use some work too. The running sequence looks odd, almost cartoon-y. It’s hilarious to watch honestly, but not exactly a vibe you want for a supposedly dark game.
Decent Voice Acting
One thing I was pleasantly surprised about was the fact that the game had voice acting—it’s pretty much fully-voiced. Lately, more and more games, even indies, have been leaning into bringing more life into their games with voice acting, and we definitely love seeing this shift.
From the moment you boot up the game, everything is voiced. The main vampire cast characters are a given, of course, but even the few dozen NPC villagers roaming around (who may end up being your indentured vampire servants) have a variety of voices or tones to it. I’m not well-versed in telling voices apart, but they’re convincing enough to feel like they’re individuals and not dull or robotic.
Eventually, they start repeating themselves over and over again (understandable at the game’s current state), but it can be seen as just a mild annoyance. The fact they even have different idle lines in different voices is a lovely addition to making the world more fleshed out, even just a little bit.
Overall Conclusion
Vampires: Bloodlord Rising has pretty solid foundations to begin with, but the overall experience still needs more than just a bit of polishing to be more enjoyable. Visually and gameplay-wise, it’s heading in the right direction. The story, though cliche, has potential. However, the execution could use so much more, as well as the game’s overall optimization. There’s a lot they could build up upon if they play their cards right.
Nevertheless, it’s decent for what it’s currently worth, though maybe you should wait for a few more updates to see how development moves forward.
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Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Product Information
| [:img:4405872:{alt:Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Cover, size:440x230, mode:original}] | |
| Title | Vampires: Bloodlord Rising |
|---|---|
| Release Date | January 30, 2026 |
| Developer | Mehuman Games |
| Publisher | Toplitz Productions |
| Supported Platforms | Steam |
| Genre | Action, Adventure, RPG, Simulation, Early Access |
| Number of Players | 1-4 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Vampires: Bloodlord Rising Official Website |
