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Disclaimer

I finished it solo. I did not and will not engage in PvP. Look for a different review if you intend to play PvP.

TL;DR

Judging by first 30-ish hours this game would be almost a 10/10.
Endgame it can become an unrewarding slog and some bosses are an insane difficulty spike.
I still recommend it.

Description

It's a semi-survival build/craft/combat game.
You play as a vampire and your goal is to increase your powers through crafting, killing bosses and building a sick castle.
You can select 3 spells from a pretty large assortment of different schools of magic + you get up to 2 skills attached to your weapon type. All skills and spells are cooldowns, there is no mana here. You can dodge and hit things with a basic attack. Low HP enemies can be drained of blood.
Draining enemies of blood will turn your class into that of the target. Each class has it's own passive bonuses and quality. For example a Rogue with 50% blood quality will give you about half of available stat bonuses of the Rogue class. Your blood depletes passively and more through automatic or active healing, so from time to time you need to snack. This will always change your class and blood quality, so hunting for tasty targets can be rewarding.
You can craft basic equipment through a menu. For more advanced stuff you need to build a castle and some crafting facilities first.
Castle has a core that you can plop down at any of unclaimed territories. Then you build castle around the core. You start off without being able to build actual castle walls, but you can place some wooden palisades. Unlocking new craft/build options is mostly done through killing bosses.
These bosses are unique enemies, usually present in special areas withing the game. You can track them through a menu, which will give you a trail to follow. Bosses have special attacks that you may need to learn how to deal with to fight them efficiently.
Materials for building/crafting are obtained by mining/logging or from enemy NPC camps. Each camp has different resources that are common in it. Mines may be filled with copper, while graveyards are good source of bone. You can also trade for some items with merchants if you find money for it.
As you advance through the crafting tree you will gain access to more and more bosses and more and more upgrades.

Pros:

+ Neat presentation
Graphics are clean and readable while containing enough detail to be interesting.
+ Variety
There is a good variety of different spell schools, each one with it's own gimmick. Blood school lets you life leech on spell hits, while undead school lets you summon skeletons for example. Coupled with decent weapon variety and 2 skills for each of those weapon types as well as equipment modifiers there's enough stuff to try for anybody to find something that works for their playstyle.
+ Combat
It's quick without feeling spammy. Different bosses encourage different playstyles or spell/weapon combos. Your dodge move has 8 second cooldown so you can't always rely on that to get you out of way of big moves and some enemies can hurt you a lot if you have no way to mitigate. Spells that provide shielding or counter-skills are helpful in those situations, but you can also just keep your distance and spam projectiles if you build around it.
+ Bosses
While most early bosses are pretty boring and generic, that changes quickly. Some bosses are really fun to fight and all of them reward you with new crafting/building plans so it's always exciting to fight them. There's enough variety in boss design too - you get your badass beasts or monsters as well as elite bandit lords or crusaders or even vampire hunters. It can get crazy when your fight gets interrupted by a fking Simon Belmont (yes, he is in this game). I also like their audio design as most of them speak, taunting you at the start of the fight, etc.
Unfortunately there are also some very bad bosses too.
+ Castle management
It's fun to build up your base and upgrade stuff. Later on you can also convert enemies to your cause by making them vampire thralls or put some in cells to act as your blood source. There's enough variety of clutter items to make your castle cozy.
+ Progression
Between crafting, building, boss hunting and material farming there's always something to do and you will always have at least 1 clear goal in order to advance in the tech tree. For example you may find armor plans that require cotton, but you can't grow it yourself, so you can invade one of the NPC cotton farms and take it.

Cons:

- Travel
By default you cannot teleport using unlockable waypoints if you have any resources. Later on you will get access to some other forms of transportation, but travel times can still be very tedious.
Suffice to say that I ended up modifying my default game settings to allow myself to teleport with resources.
Worst thing is charming enemies and having them follow you to your castle as you cannot switch to a different form if you have someone charmed. Have fun walking several kilometers home while avoiding enemies so that your follower doesn't get squished. It's especially painful when you happen to find a 100% blood quality enemy and just want to get him home, but some bomb-throwing a-hole decides to blow everything up, including his charmed buddy.
- Bad bosses
Several starter bosses are unremarkable, but that's ok.
Pre-ultimate boss is unreasonably difficult even compared to the last one. I had to lower the difficulty because learning to beat him on normal would probably take me another 4-5h and by that time I was done with the game and just wanted to see the end.
Losing to bosses drains your blood and lets you respawn at any teleport, meaning you will have to walk back to boss arena to retry. It also depletes some of your gear's durability and repairing endgame gear takes a ton of rare resources that you may have to spend hours on obtaining.
This makes those bosses not exciting to learn like in souls games, but actually discouraging and needlessly punishing. One should not be forced to grind for hours just to keep trying at a boss, this is insane.
There are 2 bosses in this game that I would categorize as unreasonable, I was able to beat 1 of them on normal through persistence, but the pre-ultimate one broke me.
- Some resources hard to get
Parts can be tricky to obtain because they only appear in specific enemy camps as resource you can mine. Grease is similar, but at least you can use some grease and mid-tier materials to generate more grease. Pristine and Bat leather drops in specific zones and you will have to commit significant amount of time to farm for them.
Gold can also be a pain, because only one type of enemies drop resources for it, unlike other metals which can be obtained in plenty amounts from mines.
- Lots of farming
Especially near the end of the game. Endgame gear will not only cost rarer resources, but also more of them than early game stuff.
Amount of farming is fine in first 3 acts, but act 4 and endgame becomes unreasonable.
- Ending
Beating last boss doesn't really end in any interesting event or anything which was disappointing.

Lowdown

It's probably in top 5 games I played this year. Honestly when I play something for this long and I STILL want more when it ends - this has to mean the game is good. I enjoyed almost every mechanic this game has and when I was done this game has left a hole similar to when I finished Subnautica. Even comparing this game to the masterpiece that first Subnautica is means that it's a worthwhile purchase, even full-price.
V Rising would be a 9/10 game, but given endgame drag and some boss issues I knock it down to an

8/10

Which still means I thoroughly recommend playing it.