The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Review

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is a prime example of how borrowing great ideas from other developers does not automatically guarantee the success of a game. Neocore Games have unashamedly adopted a great deal of elements from other popular top-down dungeon crawlers, and at times, you may find yourself thinking you're playing a cleverly disguised version of the Torchlight series.

Of course, this is nothing new in the world of video games, with even developers of triple A titles picking and choosing the best new innovations to include in their releases. The real question is whether Neocore have put these ideas to good use in creating Van Helsing, or whether it feels like a lazy copycat. Unsurprisingly, the end result is a bit of both.

We won't go into detail with Van Helsing's narrative, which was largely covered in our preview, but suffice it to say that you play as the son of Dracula's eponymous nemesis; Abraham Van Helsing. With your AI companion Catarina, you journey to Borgova in order to defeat Fulmigati, a mad scientist who has enslaved the populace with machines. Your journey starts in the forests and villages that surround the great city, and for those of you that have played dungeon crawlers before, you're likely to pick up Van Helsing's user interface and controls rather quickly.

Levels are gained through combat and questing, with each level awarding stat, skill and sporadic perk points. Stats encompass your base hit points and damage with melee, ranged and magic attacks, whilst skill points unlock increasingly devastating abilities. Perks are passive buffs that range from better drop rates to additional skill points.

As is the nature of such titles, you are likely to specialise in one form of combat. Whilst all appeared competent from the start, we decided on a range based Abraham Van Helsing, with our particular favourite skill being explosive shot which, as you might have guessed, does exactly what it says on the tin. Skill variety isn't as deep as Runic's Torchlight, but there is still plenty of scope for customisation, especially as each main skill has three buffs that can be saved as combos, to be used with a simple button press.

Said combos consume 'Rage' to execute, an energy bar that builds as you engage in combat. This can even be used to initiate combos or be stored for a general damage buff, which provides a nice, and versatile, system.

For those not accustomed, helpful tutorials punctuate the first hour of play, meaning you'll largely get to grips with how Van Helsing plays by the time you reach the first, and only, real hub world/village of the game. That doesn't mean the game world is small, in fact, the maps you explore are huge, with plenty of optional and hidden areas to find. But in terms of non-aggressive areas where you can upgrade, sell and buy items, there are only two to discover, which at times can make pacing feel slightly unbalanced.

The first handful of areas you explore may feel samey too, but environmental variance picks up at the mid-way point, with 'The Ink' and Borgova both being visually beautiful areas (easily as pretty as Torchlight or Diablo 3's myriad of locations) if slightly lacking in personality.

Mission structure is largely straightforward, with most main story NPCs residing in one of the two hub worlds. There are side missions aplenty too, and although we barely scratched the surface in regards to the optional content on offer, there seems to be a good, if slightly generic assortment of quests to complete. One of the standout missions we accepted involved us entering an alternate dimension by touching a scarecrow and having to defeat its straw-filled overlord.

Around the midpoint of your adventure, you'll find yourself in the mega city of Borgova - controlled by the mad Fulmigati, which also contains your father's old secret hideout. Once you reach the underground base, you are free to pick parts of the city to explore at will through an interface, and we couldn't help but feel that events prior to reaching Borgova were an afterthought by Neocore, as the pacing vastly improves upon arrival.

The hideout, aside from containing vendors, also features a trap crafting system that you use to defend your base. The addition is quite bizarre, as it takes the form of a tower defence minigame that, as far as we can tell, is only used once throughout the game's entire duration.

However, for all the aspects of other popular games in the genre that Van Helsing successfully emulates, there are also some rather unforgivable nuances to be experienced alongside them. The annoyingly sporadic frame rate drops we reported in the preview have been largely resolved, although the presence of large groups of enemies on-screen still causes noticeable struggle. This would be a rather minute problem were it not for the fact that enemies in Van Helsing only come in hordes.

The artificial difficulty that arises from Van Helsing's poor AI is undoubtedly its biggest weakness, and whilst some enemies do have some form of intelligence, Neocore seem to have supplemented the apparent lack of such enemies by putting hundreds upon hundreds of monsters in each map. Difficulty is fine, but when said difficulty involves hordes of endless, largely mindless enemies swarming you to the point of making tactics pointless, combat becomes rather tiresome and dull.

When Van Helsing is at its best, its successful features far outweigh its weaknesses; it's just a shame that these highs aren't as frequent as we had hoped. Regardless, If you're a fan of the dungeon crawler genre, Van Helsing may not reach the lofty heights of the best its kind, but it's certainly worth a play through for fans of the eternally addictive kill-and-loot gameplay on offer. Newcomers may be better off with the more refined titles out there, but at ten hours for a basic play through, multiplayer co-op and hours of optional extras, Van Helsing is one of the better indie games you'll find on Steam this summer.