he Adventures of Van Helsing Is a game that immediately felt familiar. The limited abilities you can use at any one time. The incredibly basic skills that have very little variety or creativity, resulting in a repetitive gameplay loop. After googling the developer, NeoCore, I now realise that's because it's the same developer who made WH40k Inquisitor - Martyr. A game that while I enjoyed overall for its realization of the 40k world and its enemy design, it also lacked depth and variety in its gameplay. While I enjoyed Helsing in parts, particularly towards the centre, overall my 13 hours spent as Abraham Van Helsing, and his ghostly companion Katarina was mediocre at best. The variety of the skills go as far as attack adds AOE, attack adds rapid fire, attack adds elemental damage, and some very uninspired skills like a lightning bolt (basically no different to the poison or cold shot), a fireball and a beam attack. Compare this to Abraham's great uncle, the Necromancer from Diablo 2 preceding him more than 10 years, he could summon a variety of creatures, or rely entirely on curses to debuff and damage enemies, or use a spell casting kit that had a creative spin in the form of firing bones at your enemy, or mix any of the above in a viable way. There are some interesting abilities like slow time or the mana shield but the rest are basically passive buffs, this extends to the loot, with no unique abilities, a mistake that ARPGs often fall into when they forget what that the A stands for Action. On top of this the game punishes you for experimenting. I tried to split build sword and gun, and was getting absolutely steam rolled before in Act 2. So I swapped to just guns, dex but still tried different abilities like lightning, cold shot and the beam. They all sucked. So in the end I ended up with a build that used poison shot that made enemies vulnerable to other attacks and just blasted them down with single shot or groups with an AOE explosive shot. The most boring reductive build I could ever imagine. I couldn't even find any good dual six-shooters, instead the only good guns were rifles. Being a dual wielding, spell slinging monster slayer was the main thing about this game (essentially the front cover) that appealed to me, and I was robbed of even that. By the end even this wasn't enough to kill the bullet sponge enemies as I'd backpedal, shoot, backpedal, shoot often half way across the map. Before wandering back to where I was and repeating. This is on normal difficulty by the way... In the end I was so sick of this formula and discovered the lamest most annoying uninspired enemy in the game, a flying saucer jelly fish like enemies that shoot lightning on you and kill you quick smart, that I found myself just waltzing through all the enemies, taking the death, and ghost walking until I got to the next area. On top of this the final boss was incredibly lame. The mech was pretty cool but not really what I expect to fight as Van Helsing the vampire slayer. In fact I don't think I killed a single vampire in this game, what the hell... But the boss mad scientist flabbergast or whatever his name was, would also send his worst creation at you, dozens of jelly saucers. I ended up having to destroy all of the monster closets that would spawn them, the towers that heal him, and the wolf cages before taking him down. But he got bugged twice and was stuck mid-death from above, which seemed to happen when I triggered slow mo as he did it. Grrrr how has this not been cleaned up. It was an unfortunate shitty cherry to top a game I was happy to power through and immediately uninstall.
There are a few positives worth mentioning. The art style is fantastic for its time, really evoking the Eastern Europe feeling of the Van Helsing movie. Whether it be the dark polish forest or the medieval cities. The enemies initially feel familiar after playing the polish inspired Witcher series, like the Rusalka. This was the case at least in the initial forest and swamp. Once you reach the city you're swarmed by the black plague, that is rats and ratmen. This immediately reminded me of another game for the second time, evoking an ARPG copy-cat of Vermintide. The models are carbon copies down to the the muskets the ranged enemies carry and the acid throwers "Igor" slug around. The abominations you encounter later are clearly meant to be Nurgle demons. The city itself also feels similar to the Old World. I wonder if they intended for this to be a licensed game, at the very least they're huge fans. So props to the art team for those enemy designs as they're fantastic, another credit to when I played Martyr. But unfortunately this ends when you get to the last area that have generic steamborg frankenstein enemies. Finally ending in the saucers and robots which I've already given such "glowing" praise. It seems the creative steam ran out after they stopped looking at The Witcher and Warhammer, and I wished they didn't, as those creatures were much more enjoyable to slaughter. Overall I did not enjoy The Adventures of Van Helsing, and I hope his second quest takes some huge leaps to improve upon the first game.
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| The environments evoke some interesting folk designs. |
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