The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Review (PC)

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is a Diablo inspired action RPG developed by NeocoreGames. The game is set in Eastern Europe where magic and science fiction coexist. You get to play as the son of Van Helsing from the original Dracula novel.

In this game, you find yourself in Borgova, which is plagued by monsters and it is your job to hunt them down, and free the land. This quest will take you through several areas like swamp forests, mines, sewers and elaborate futuristic steampunk cities. There is a lot of variety in level settings.

You also get a ghost companion, Lady Katarina. There is some banter between the main character and the companion which can be funny at times, but most of the times, its just cliches. I felt that some of the abilities for the companion were either not very well developed or not well explained. For example, I have never seen the  companion use a melee weapon, yet you could equip the companion with one. I am not sure why...

That said, having a companion is very useful, not just during combat, but for doing tedious tasks such as selling items. Just like in Torchlight, it is possible to add items to the inventory of the companion and send her off to town to sell them.

Inventory of Van Helsing and Lady Katrina

The gameplay got very tedious towards the end of the game. In the beginning, there is a learning curve, and its fun experimenting with different abilities, but halfway through the game, it becomes very stale, because there is not much else to discover in terms of abilities, and the loot becomes pointless because I already have the best weapons. By the end of the game, I had over 700,000 gold, and there was nothing to spend it on. This would have been fine if the combat didn't get so repetitive.

Combat generally involves a large mob of enemies rushing your position. Not necessarily a bad thing, but more often than not, the mobs are very unfair. Often times I found myself overpowered, and no combination of abilities and weapons allowed me to defeat the mobs. It is possible that I could have made a mistake in points allocation, but I felt as if these sections are created to be unfair. In addition to this, the game has these narrow levels with tall obstacles (such as pillars) which obstruct the view and it can combat more frustrating in certain situations.



At times there are 20 enemies all firing at the same time, and there is no way to retaliate except pick off a couple of enemies, die, respawn and retry. This is not fun for me, and its not good design in my opinion.

The game does not seem to take the story very seriously, its laced with anachronistic references, intended to be humorous, I am sure, but it got old, and unlike Diablo, there are no memorable characters to be found here, except for the main character and the companion. This is a bit of shame because the game had a lot of potential, but just did not capitalize on it. I am sure the humorous take on the vampires and mad scientists might appeal to some, but I was hoping for something different.

Is that a Witcher reference?

I purchased this game as part of Humble Jumbo Bundle on August 20, 2014 for $1. I got this game along with others as a part of this bundle, and for that price, you can't really go wrong. Would I recommend this game? Well, if you can pick it for a $1, sure. Otherwise, not really. Its not a terrible game, but there is nothing original here, and there are better games out there worthy of time investment.

Conclusion

- Uninteresting loot
- Silly story
- Weak voice acting
- Graphics didn't age well
- Not enough content
- Repetitive combat

Verdict - There are better games out there.