The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

 

Lately i've been interested in playing just about any ARPG I can come across. Looking for another one to play I remembered I had this Van Helsing game tucked away in my Steam library for many years that I forgot about. I never really knew anything about the game other than its a Diablolike in some Van Helsing universe. I might have given it a chance 10 years ago and played for 2 hours and then uninstalled, so I guess at the time I wasnt that into it  - but the great thing about games like this is they almost always feature full campaign co-op modes, so its a great genre to play through with a friend. That's the main reason I was interested and returned to it.

The game has 3 classes/characers to choose from, I cant remember what theyre called but I just picked the basic sword guy. Then, you have to go to the server browser and find your friends game to join them and you can start playing co-op from the beginning of the game. The first impression is pretty mild, the graphics arent great at first glance especially the aliasing and jaggies , so the overall presentation leaves much to be desired. Although the UI, hud, inventory looks good and is a faithful recreation of the Diablo formula. The inventory uses the same grid based items having different sizes depending on type, which is nice, because some shitty ARPGs just make all the loot the same size square which makes it feel like a bad MMO or something.

As you go through the first bit of the game it introduces some unique mechanics to you. For starters they tried to make the combat here I guess more involved than other ARPGs because on the skill tree you have your primary attack skills, but then above those you can choose to get these smaller nodes that make your attack do special things if you press certain buttons. You can press A, S, D or a combination of them to do different minor 'combo' abilities for each main attack. The added buffs were things like life steal, bleed, or just 50% damage. I didn't really enjoy the concept of having to juggle pressing A,S,D, plus Q for health and 1 for health too, so the whole game I just made a conscious choice to use the D 50% more damage exclusively to keep things simple, although I do find it neat how there is the ability to do involved combos if you so desire.

The RPG mechanics and skills here are fairly in depth but it allows to keep it simple if you want.For starters, its different in that it has firearms. You can use hunting rifles, pistols, shotguns, the kind of 18th century victorian weaponry. In the skill tree menu you have multiple tabs you can flip through which lets you specialize into different things. It was like, one tree for melee, one tree for ranged, one for Passive buffs (Auras) and one for special abilities called Tricks. For the most part, I like to keep arpgs simple and be the generic Warrior sword guy, so I just stuck to the Melee tree and tried to get as much AOE as possible because it was obvious most of the game youre going to be fighting swarms of enemies instead of one by one. So I went with this Cleave skill. Eventually I was having annoying mana problems so I had to max out this passive ability that gives me mana on hit which helped quite a bit, plus its nice you can get a Mana on hit stat as well.

The itemization is fairly decent, theres all sorts of different unique affixes and stats that can roll on gear, making sorting through pickups an interesting process. However, the game does simplfiy things a lot if you want to. It shows you red minus and green pluses on every piece of gear instantly letting you know whats a downgrade or upgrade, while this doesnt indicate everything about the item as being nesseasrily more useful or not, its a great rule of thumb. You can even quickly go to the character sheet to see your overall DPS simplified and simply equip any gear that increases this number, although you have to be concerned about your defenses still. I thought the itemization was fairly well done for a casual jump in and play with your buddy type experience, as for any End game stuff I don't know if it would work out to be a satisfying experience there, the loot may feel trivial once you get to the upper eschelon of gameplay, but who is doing that for Van Helsing? probably no one.

The loot follows the typical standard of White (normal), blue(magic), yellow(rare), then unique, which is great. You can simply jump in and play this and be familliar with how everything works if youve played another ARPG before, it doesnt try to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes you just want more of a good thing. I dont really like when ARPGs try to reinvent the wheel, unless its really good and innovative. Not just different for the sake of being different.

The game has 3 acts, but its not really clear when you've reached the next one, or the differences between them. Thematically the whole game kind of follows a similar feeling. Its a lot of roaming around open field forested grassy knoll places, here and there you can get warped into these optional floating earthy rock places that are cool, and towards the second half of the game you get sent to this Secret Lair type hub base that has a bit of change of theme but the locations arent all that interesting. Though the use of colors does stand out, theres a lot of dynamic vibrant uses of colors like the game has a lot of blues and greens purples in the lighting which makes everything pop on screen.

The music in particular is fairly damn good, surprisingly. Especially the main theme that plays in Secret Lair and overall the whole soundtrack is captivating and sounds magical. The game does have this neo-gothic victorian overtone and theme to it which is really nice to see in an RPG its a great setting, although some of the aesthetics of the armors and characters isnt quite to my taste. I would prefer the characters wear more chainmail or plate armor or something instead of like, tophats and capes but it is what it is. The equipment you put on doesnt really feel that visually impactful and doesnt change how you look that much beyond a slightly different sword appearance and hat.

For some reason the game only has Swords. Theres no axes, spears, pikes, halberds, maces, hammers etc.. Just double swords, and a "2 hand sword" that for some stupid reason you still swing with one hand. That was pretty disappointing. But still, it was fun and exciting finding constant upgrades for my weapons.

The monsters and especially death animations and variety was a highlight, lots of wearwolves and beasts, vampiric enemies, mythical magical type creatures, zombies etc. But especially when you kill them every death feels like an 'event'. Sometimes even chunks of gore fly all around the screen which is especially satisfying.

The general combat is basically just hold mouse1 while your guy auto attacks, then you constantly spam health potions or your healing ability - but the catch is they are on a significant cooldown of like 30 seconds. So it becomes this juggle of trying to heal more damage than youre recieving while dancing around the cooldowns. For the most part it works and is satisfactory, but I cant help but feel its a kind of awkward clunky workaround to the problem in the first place of having too spongy enemies. I dont think we fucked up our characters too much but nearly every group of enemy was a giant sponge that took 30+ seconds to kill which at times really brought the whole combat down to a slog kinda.

Some of the worst downsides is the game is how it seems like it uses Monster level scaling. So its like, all the monsters in the world level up along side you invisibly. You cant ever see the monster level. If you get really high level, and go back to the beginning of the game, the monsters will still be almost as strong as you and be tanky still. That just feels bad in ARPG's. I wish devs would never do this. I want to build a refined strong character that can obliterate earlier mobs, but this system defeats that. It almost makes leveling up feel pointless. Why bother when the enemy is just going to level up and be just as strong anyway? Its like if you just speedran through the game at level 1 it would be just as hard or even easier. I could be wrong about all this, but thats just how the whole system felt to me. I never really felt a significant power increase in my character, as soon as I felt like I was getting stronger, the enemies would equalize a moment later.

The other bad problem is the entire quest system and quest direction. Its almost impossible to tell where a quest is or what quest youre even doing. Theres almost no direction or the direction thats here is either a broken buggy mess or just confusing as shit. The map will tell you where some objectives are, but not all. And even if you deselect quests to track, they still show up on the map. Often times it will tell you to go to a certain place, but not even tell you what place its connected to so you end up just running through almost the whole game again looking for it. Its fine, we pretty much did every side quest anyway because we were enjoying the game so much, but still the whole quest system could of been handled better.

Its a relatively short ARPG too, only 3 acts and act 3 is really short. Act 1 the hub world is some cozy village, act 2 its a secret underground lair. I especially appreciate how easy it is to respec your character, just a couple thousand gold which is in abundance, so it makes experimentation fun and viable, something ARPGs need.

Oh yeah, the game is really buggy, too. Frequent crashes, things not working properly, quests not showing up, achievements not unlocking, so that really started to grate on me. The game does have really satisfying achievements, something I dont usually mention in reviews but every 5 minutes they'll be popping up and its fun to hunt them down.

The ending of the game was pretty lame and disappointing, last boss was just a giant mech with this evil villian guy with wacky voice acting you just go around destroying these machines then kill him. He glitched out and just stood there for 10 mins doing nothing then the game randomly ended with a brief cliffhanger cutscene.

Overall I'm surprised how much I liked it, i thought the game would be trash which is why I ignored it for so many years in my library, but at least for a co-op playthrough its a pretty good time, I think the game being fairly easy to comprehend and understand plays a big part in that, but it also has enough depth to sink your teeth into its various systems if you really want to. It's also quite eventful, in comparison to other ARPGS (cough, Titan Quest) every 15 minutes or so youll be seeing some cutscene or fighting some big boss or seeing some new enemy or interesting point of interest, so we could play this game for hours on end and not get bored unlike playing Titan Quest for 2 hours and feeling real bored. So yeah, the games pretty fun, but not without its flaws.

7/10