I finally sat down and played through this game. My time spent on this game is what I would say is probably reasonable to expect the amount of time you will have to put in to complete it on default settings. It was pretty fun overall, I don't regret purchasing the game, however, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone in good conscious.
This game feels really unique in offering an interesting 'power fantasy' style of a vampire game. The castle building is is good enough to have fun with, and I will say the boss design is addictive and fun. If you want to feel like a vampire, and like the sort of albion online, diablo style kind of combat, its great.
BUT, this is not a practical game for an adult with responsibilities to play in my opinion, at least on default settings. Everything takes too much time. You need more resources? You teleport there and then, you can't teleport back. You have to walk it all the way back to your base for the vast majority of the game. Yes this can be turned off in settings, but it's odd to me that the default is to have items prevent teleportation on by default.
The whole game is balanced around PVP. And if that's your thing, power to you. For me, I played solo PVE for the whole game (I did play on a server with other folks around, but I fought each boss independently). Once you get to late game, every resource takes quite a long time to craft. Armor takes literal minutes to craft. Combined with the walking back and forth to get resources, any time you are trying to improve your gear, or your castle ends up feeling like a perpetual fetch quest where you spend more time waiting than playing.
The in game solution for this are the servants. You can capture certain enemies and turn them into your servants to go to the resource camps and get them for you. Sound great right? Well, here's where this games obsession with waiting comes back: The minimum time you can send a servant out on a mission is 2 hours. The maximum length of these missions, is 16 hours. Luckily, these are real life hours so you don't have to be in game for the whole time.
But there's more of this real life time mechanic. If you play on a server ( the community that plays this game is really nice, so I would recommend playing on a PVE server), you have to keep filling up your castle's heart with essence or you could lose it. In the first couple tiers of play, completely filling up the heart with essence keeps it protected for 2ish days. I am very lucky that I was able to log on frequently enough early on that I never lost my castle, but it was something that was on my mind while I wasn't playing the game.
But this is where this gameplay loop started to break down for me. As an adult with a job and other real life responsibilities, I really only have an hour a couple times a week and maybe a few hours on a Saturday to indulge myself in a little bit of gaming. These mechanics created a sort of addiction stress loop for me, similar to a mobile game, where if I didn't log on that day, I'd loose something. If I didn't optimize the servants I was sending out, I feared that the next time I would log in, I'd have to spend my 1 hour walking to and from the iron mine just so I could get better gear.
Other than that though, this was quite a fun time. If you are a student on a summer break, I can envision this being a great time. The boss design is solid, and I enjoyed the mostly linear progression of the game where you always have someone to fight next. It just really is a bummer that all the mechanics, like bat form and the machine that allows you to do some basic crafting automation aren't available until the last 10-15 hours of gameplay. I ended up giving up on the servants at that point because I couldn't get them better gear without spending even more hours gathering resources to automate making them armor, to send them out to get me more resources. I ended up just having them collect fish until I beat Dracula.
In summary, only play this game if you can play really consistently for 80-100 hours, or mess with the settings to allow you to teleport with all items and increase basic resource drop rates.
