Out
of all of the characters in classic literary fiction, it makes the
most sense to create a Diablo-like action role-playing game based off
of Abraham Van Helsing. Introduced in Bram Stoker's Dracula,
Van Helsing is a monster-hunting professional that has many titles to
his name. He also was not given a strong background within Stoker's
work, leaving great potential for past and future monster-hunting
situations to be crafted by other writers.Surprisingly enough, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, the Diablo-like ARPG developed by NeoCore, touches on neither Abraham's past, present, nor future, instead focusing on the adventures of Van Helsing's son. While this may be considered a cop-out by some, I would consider this a positive as it distances the mediocre story and script from the highly-regarded source material. Lingering on the point of the script, while it is nice to see fully-voiced dialogue, it is a shame to see megabytes wasted as the voice actors are definitely subpar. But then again people don't come in expecting a great story when playing a Diablo clone; they came to kill monsters to get loot so that they can kill bigger monsters to get better loot.
In
this sense, The
Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing
is serviceable. By no means is it a Torchlight II or a Diablo, but
the monsters drop loot and they drop it quite often. There are the
standard equipment slots; headgear, gauntlets, body armor, boots, two
rings, a pendent, and two weapons. There are a bundle of
weapon-specific attributes and an 'essence' system that allows
player-allocated modifications to weapons. The unusual Rage combat
mechanic, where points gained from kills can be put into one-shot
effects that modify specific skills/attacks, does bring an
interesting spin that compliments standard Diablo-esque gameplay.
However, there are two major issues with the overall game design;
skill trees and difficulty.
It is very obvious to tell right from the get-go that the two skill
trees are divided between melee and ranged character builds. While
skill points can be spent on passive and active abilities, the main
focus of skill points will be concentrated on those two trees,
leaving very little in the way of genuine customisation. What continues this
aggravation is that, much like other RPGs, levelling up skills and
acquiring new ones is restricted by several conditions, leaving very
little to breathe and create a personal avatar when starting new characters.
It is also disappointing to see that in the end the two skill trees both favour magic users more than any other character build. I would even
go so far as to say that playing a straight-up fighter is impossible,
especially with the difficulty issues that the game has.
While
remaining reasonable for the first few hours, the difficulty of The
Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing
ramps up quickly. This partially has to do with the somewhat
unreasonable groups of monsters that easily swarm the player. Most
enemies come in their own gangs of sorts and attacking any one of
them alerting the rest of the enemies to your location. Another issue
is that there are no real enemies which could be considered, cannon fodder; many of them take a surprising amount of hits to kill and
can do significant damage to the player. This, combined with the
swarm behaviour, makes dying in the game very easy. Groups of champion
monsters are the worst, as they can be frequent and take several
dozen hits while dishing out lots of damage. And all of the
experiences I am describing to you were all on playing the normal
difficulty; I cannot begin to imagine what perseverance it takes to
get through the higher difficulties.
But on the good side for The
Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing,
I can say that the game has a significant amount of content. Despite
not having procedurally/ randomly generated levels, there are dozens
of quests in each act and there is even an end-game tower defense
mode that looks entertaining. The multiplayer is a nice touch as
well, as the difficulty would be reduced by more players.
While being primarily a PC game and thus having adequate control options,
there is one thing that bugged me a little. It was that
seemingly random keys were tied to very specific game functions and
could not be reset. Who uses the '4' key as a critical,
cannot-be-changed function in a game? Why can only 'T' be used for
one action? Why in the world is 'F' restricted? To me, those
restrictions make absolutely no sense.
In
the end, The
Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing
is passable. If you already own and have played the bonkers out of
Diablo
and Torchlight,
this will fill a gap until something better comes along. But for
those wanting to get into the genre of Diablo clones or want something
that has got a quality shine to it, look elsewhere.
- V8Ninja
Contributor
