[REVIEW] The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

Jonathan Tay

(PC [REVIEWED])

To answer your first question: no, you do not get to play as Hugh Jackman.

The action RPG (aka “Diabloclone”) genre has been saturated as of late. Torchlight II, Path of the Exile, and even Diablo III seemed to have simultaneously stepped up in an attempt to take the title of best aRPG from Diablo II (or the original Diablo, if you’re a hipster).  Now The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing takes its shot – but do we really need another contender for the crown?

The first thing we need to ask ourselves is, “how much does the game stand out from its peers?” At first glance, things look pretty amazing. The art style is an impressive mix of gothic fantasy and steampunk, while the graphics themselves are of clearly high quality. It’s obvious that quite a bit of time and effort was put into the look and feel of Borgovia (the world you explore), and the developers should be commended for it.

Unfortunately, we should heed the old “don’t judge a book by its cover” rule in this case – and I feel really bad for saying that, believe me. But underneath the surface, I found Van Helsing to be a pretty shallow game. You star as Van Helsing’s son, sent to Borgovia at the behest of some ill-defined characters in order to complete some fluffy goal. You are accompanied by Lady Katarina, your wry and spunky ghost sidekick. The dynamic between the two mostly just involves exchanging witty repartee. While that’s all well and good, Van Helsing never seems to want to get serious, and its story and characters, while starting off interesting and defying some tropes, never seem to develop beyond their superficial gloss.

The worst part is that the rats are waiting for the cutscene to end. 

But how important is a story, really, in a game of this genre? I can easily forgive a weak story for superlative gameplay (such as with 99% of the MMOs I play – The Old Republic is perhaps the 1% that bucks the trend). Unfortunately, the game seems to be lacking even this. At its core, Van Helsing is an incredibly derivative experience, doing little to alter the tried-and-true formulae of the Diablo clone. In many ways, it actually makes the formula worse.

The only character you’ll be able to play is Van Helsing, and he can develop in two major focuses: melee and ranged combat. There are various skills you can learn and improve using skill points in both of these respective areas, but at its heart, there are only two skill trees. And even with the addition of tricks (activated abilities like healing and shielding) and auras (passive abilities like regenerating health), there’s very little in the ways of mixing things up. Think of Van Helsing as a Diablo game with only 1.5 characters.

I say 1.5 because Lady Katarina is her own battle-ready entity. She has her own inventory, skills, and can be set up for ranged or melee attacks. Unfortunately, she’s largely useless, as there’s not much in the way of AI for this game (she tends to stand still as she’s getting swarmed even when she’s set up for ranged attacks). Also, as the difficulty increases, her utility decreases. Her skills are also Van Helsing-centric, typically providing small bonuses to you instead of augmenting her. Cool, I guess.

The poor AI leads me into my next, and arguably biggest gripe with the game: the combat. Good lord! There are several different enemy types in the game, which have different sorts of attacks and different resistances. The idea is you should play strategically and tactically to take out mobs. This would be cool if the only AI for enemies wasn’t just “swarm and attack”. Every battle is literally a clusterfuck of effects and animations. It’s incredibly easy to devolve into just clicking the mouse button haphazardly since there’s no way to tell what’s happening at any given time. Part of the problem is that there’s no sense of collision: nothing seems to be a solid, individual entity; everything just melds together into a crowd. Attacking an enemy is like attacking plastic. They don’t respond to anything. Meanwhile, even the basic goblins in Diablo II would run if you took out too many of them, and rally around leaders!

What is happening?

There are also very few options for true crowd control. Whatever skills you get will barely phase enemies. Later on in the game, you can shoot explosive barrels and such to aid you in taking out mobs, which would have been cool had I been able to click on them. I was not because enemies literally just fill up the screen, and it’s almost impossible to click on something else. It’s almost been fatal in cases where I’ve needed to move somewhere else and been unable to.

Even the looting aspect of the game lacks personality. Good items will fall into your lap, and in great quantities. I’ve never really gotten the sense that I found a truly awesome item, or had gotten attached to anything. It’s just sell, sell, sell, in order to accrue a wealth of gold that you end up doing very little with. Respawning is perhaps the most costly thing you can do in the game (you can choose between respawning where you died, at a checkpoint, or back in town, at progressively lower costs), and even that is chump change.

I also tried the multiplayer, but besides it being buggy – I’ve experienced issues where my character wasn’t moving, and I’ve heard of many instances of simply being unable to play – it wasn’t that fun. In fact, I almost felt bad for dragging someone else into the monotony.

Anyway, this review has been going on for quite a while, and there are elements of the game that I’ve left untouched (such as the music, the Rage and crafting systems, and the inexplicable tower defense minigame), but I think I can safely sum them up, and the entirety of the game, with this phrase: cool, but underdeveloped. Make no mistake, the game is playable, and there are plenty of interesting ideas in there, but none of that really showed for me.

WHAT IS HAPPENING!??!?!?!??!??!

If you’re truly hungering for a Diablo-esque experience for some reason, then I guess The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing can be a fix. It’s also cheap – $15 on Steam, to be precise, which, for a single class Diablothat takes place in a different world, and lasts for about 8-10 hours, isn’t bad. But for me there’s just too much Dynasty Warriors (generic and repetitive) and not enough Dark Souls (weight and substance) to make the game enjoyable. DLC and sequels are on the way, though, and if NeocoreGames, the developers, can make some serious changes, then the series might be worth keeping an eye on.