Look, there are more than a couple of things to like about this game: Van himself, he is very heroic and stoic, just like how I like them. The idea of a ghost companion, a Lady Katarnia, no less, is very cool as well, their banter and contrasting personalities are fun to witness. The settings are steamy and foggy, all those machines creating endless pillars of smoke and electricity shooting about from contraptions that were made to kill indiscriminately between hordes of filthy beasts and other brutes and creatures. A fragmented world that desperately needed a savior, then, comes Van Helsing, the son of his father, to defeat the evil and right the wrongs.
The game has many upgrade systems, as you would expect, and your companion has her own abilities and passives, which adds depth to the game. I liked it, but nothing is ever clear when an ability is active, when its effects are present or not. The soundtracks are nice… until they start playing again, in different parts of the world, killing their unique attachment and identity.
The game desperately needs a remake, for there are so many issues that cannot be fixed easily without rethinking systems and starting over, which is unlikely to happen.
The core gameplay itself is very boring and bland. For starters, you can only have two active abilities at any given time, the first of which will almost always be dealing damage, meaning, throughout the whole game, you have one slot for an ability that does something other than deal damage… Sure, you can stop mid-fight, click around hurriedly for fear of dying, and change your 2nd ability and equip another one, but this gets old fast, and it's unreliable and not a realistic way of playing, and it just goes against what makes an ARPG fun: steamrolling everything with myriad abilities and powers. I know this game is old, but come on, Titan Quest 1 did it a decade before this one.
Another atrocious design decision was the rage system: you can power up your main (two) abilities using mini power-ups, but to use them, you need rage, which is gained by killing monsters. Now, idk about other builds, but for mine, a standard class out of the 6, a knight, I almost always didn’t have rage… You spend it, and then you finish killing enemies, and more often than not, it’s not refilled, let alone having it always available to constantly buff yourself during the action. I really don’t understand the need for a second mana bar…
But the third tragedy of a design is the healing system: you can only carry one (1) healing flask, maybe later you unlock another one, but at around 20 hours, I can only have one. Being a melee in-your-face class with one single healing item simply does not work. I constantly have to fight, heal, get very low and run away, wait for healing to recharge, go in again, repeat.
The game is old, graphically and technically. It bugs out and doesn’t load sometimes, ‘high’ effects bug out in the nexus, giving you a mini seizure till you turn them off… leave nexus, turn them on, come back, turn them off. The game refuses to load at all till you edit the registry in Windows…? I have no idea how such a game-breaking bug is not fixed. It’s just a slog to wade through.
I suppose it would be fair to say you should only play this ARPG if you played the other, better, ones first and only then would this deserve your time, or if you are really a fan of Van Helsing, the man who says things like: “You dont have to worry about me, my lady, I was born to fight.” and I wish the game was better to enjoy more of him.
