The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is a 2013 ARPG by the studio that later made Warhammer Inquisitor Martyr and Prophecy. You play as the eponymous Van Helsing, (frequently mistaken for your more illustrious father Abraham of the original Dracula novel) in the middle of typical rambunctious steampunk adventures with your ghostly companion Lady Katarina.
The campaign is surprisingly short, comprising 3 chapters: the wilderness around the rural village Markovna, the East side of city Borgova (capital of Borgovia), and the West side. There is post-campaign content - “scenario” maps with monsters above level 30, and “neverending story” where monsters keep on scaling - but I didn’t play them.
Your character power comes from points you put into 4 attributes (Body, Dexterity, Willpower, and Luck), each affecting a couple of stats (for example Body improves life, defence, and melee damage); 4 tabs of skills (melee, ranged, “tricks” active spell abilities, and passive auras), each containing small trees of half a dozen skills with a few modifier powerups each; “perks” granting minor specialized stat boosts (eg Agile gives you Dexterity and dodge chance, Collector gives you another Inventory page); and Katarina’s attributes (having similar effects to you) and skills (one simpler skill tree, many of the skills boosting your stats).
During battle you can instantly swap between your melee and ranged weapons, swap between a couple of skillset loadouts for each, and spend “rage” (gained from killing enemies) to infuse your next ability with the modifier powerups you’ve unlocked for it. You can also cast “spells” (typically healing or a long-range dash), which have fairly long cooldowns.
The weapons, skillsets, and powerups are unnecessarily complicated (and button-hungry) and you don’t seem to get enough skill points to build out both melee and ranged capabilities. I ended up using two ranged skills (single target and AoE) with their 2 passive modifiers and 3 active powerups, and two tricks (healing and dash) for the entire game.
Katarina can be helpful (especially her stun), but she falls to enemies extremely quickly when targeted, so you have to swap her into ghost mode when her health gets low. It’s a bit questionable whether the effort you put into gearing and leveling her is worth her limited assistance, but at least she banters with Van Helsing.
Gear is straightforward: you have 4 armor slots (body armor, gloves, cape, boots), 6 accessory slots (2 rings, amulet, hat, belt, trophy), a melee weapon, and a ranged weapon; Katrina has body armor, 2 rings, amulet, and both weapon slots. You can craft an additional affix onto each piece of gear, and some of them allow socketing “essence” items onto them for more stats.
Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing treads a fine line with enemy scaling; early on monsters are okay, maybe a bit dangerous, late game some of them are extremely tanky and lethal, and your options to scale are limited. I spent a lot of time doing hit-and-run tactics, and kiting large groups of enemies through the entire map, occasionally firing my AoE skill. Fortunately your movement speed is pretty fast; the modern ARPG dash was sorely missed but I used a dash “trick” (with a long cooldown) in its place. So I made do but I’m not sure this is the intended player experience; more DPS, more dual melee/ranged capability, stronger Katarina could have made this less of a slog. It’s okay to have slower combat, it’s not okay for you to have lots of downtime in combat, and lots of these slow encounters throughout the map. Having played Titan Quest 2 and Grim Dawn recently, getting this balance right is crucial to whether the ARPG combat feels tedious or fun, and Van Helsing spent a bit too much time on the tedious side.
One area in particular was egregious: you walk down the middle of three long parallel paths (only connected right at the end), with machine gun robots and cannon monsters firing at you from the sides offscreen - I can’t imagine how a melee build is supposed to handle this. There was a bit too much hard-to-perceive impassable terrain, particularly in the wilderness and the floating island mystical realm, which could easily result in you being boxed in and killed.
There is a decent amount of monster variety but some of their abilities are on the strong side. One monster was completely immune to my fire attacks, another could chase me down across the map, another had an undodgeable hook, and another had a cage ability that meant death if there were too many enemies nearby. Some of the boss battles were great; I ran into a group of weirdos and expected them to say ominous things and disappear, but instead they all attacked me and that was a wild fight. However others summon far too many minions and make you run in circles a lot, or have lethal ranged capabilities and make you hide around corners and behind terrain. A bit of this is fine, but there was too much of it. The final boss required me to run around the arena avoiding him completely for several minutes so as not to be oneshot by homing projectiles or a leap attack.
The story is set in a steampunk gothic-noir setting with gun-wielding automatons, mad scientists, mutants, werewolves, and airships, and unfortunately it promised more than it delivered. There were a couple of interesting setups like defending the village, or playing tower defence in the secret lair, but it seemed the game covered a less colorful chapter in Van Helsing and Katarina’s journeys than other adventures it alluded to. Van Helsing and Katarina’s repartee was okay but underwhelming (her getting mad if you give money to beggars was funny though). The ending was also inconclusive; I guess the second game will continue the story. I’ll also note that the final boss rattled off a bunch of aged pop-culture references that elicited a complex mixture of annoyance, amusement, and nostalgia.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is okay to play through once, but the experience it delivers comes across as a missed opportunity.
