Victor Vran: Overkill Edition – Review
Follow Genre: Isometric Action RPG
Developer: Haemimont Games
Publisher: EuroVideo Medien
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, XBox One
Tested on: PC

Victor Vran: Overkill Edition – Review

Site Score
8.8
Good: Character build flexibility
Bad: Dependent on luck with gear drops
User Score
9.0
(3 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 9.0/10 (3 votes cast)

Victor Vran is an isometric dungeon crawler hack ‘n slash action RPG, with a beautiful dark theme, funny narration, nice character designs and a great combat system. Victor Vran is developed by the Bulgarian indie developer Haemimont Games, and is published by EuroVideo Medien. It’s been published on Steam in 2015, and has only recently been released for consoles, in the beginning of June, 2017.

Victor Vran Logo

Story

The mysterious monster hunter Victor Vran arrives in Zagoravia to find his friend, Adrian. The town he arrives in is swarmed by spiders and undead monsters, and after cutting his way through these ravenous creatures he finds a castle and within it’s walls a desperate queen who is determined to save the land. Victor’s only reason for visiting Zagoravia was because his friend specifically asked him to come, therefore he initially declines the queens plea for help. But after learning of Adrian’s fate and finding out more about the history of Zagoravia and what had happened recently to cause the swarms of evil, Victor eventually decides to stay and help.

Graphics

This game looks very polished. The dark atmosphere is conveyed by beautiful graphics with a painted look. You have an Isometric view on the region you’re fighting in, where you can turn the camera to view all angles. The models and animations are detailed and look great, and many different weapons and outfits you equip have separate textures. Conversations will be accompanied by an image of the character you’re talking to, which are nicely drawn. The style of this game looks like a mix of steampunk Van Hellsing and Diablo. The weapons effects look glowy, colorful and spectacular. The cutscenes of the game are made in a stylized, layered style, with simple animations, very pretty thanks to the painted look of the characters and backdrops.

Victor Vran screen 1

Sounds

Victor Vran has beautiful music which fits the dark mood of this game. This game also has a lot of narration, which tells the story as you go along. It’s not just Victor talking about his impressions, but there’s also a mysterious voice in your head which seems to be constantly making fun of you. It’s very nice to be listening to the narration during play, it makes the hacking and slashing just that much more fun to do.

Gameplay

Victor Vran is a hack ‘n slash action RPG with an interesting combat and gear system, a nice dark atmosphere and good narration. There’s a lot of humor in this game, both in narration and during some encounters; for example: some skeletons have ‘invisible horse’ in their description and are dancing the Gangnam-style dance.

There are no classes in this game, your play-style is decided by the items you equip. You can make a great self-healing/leeching tank build, a crit-heavy rogue build, a magic wielding mage which will empty out battlefield upon arrival, or anything you desire. Different weapons grant different skills and special attacks. Passive effects are decided by your armor and your ‘cards’, a sort of amulets. Besides that, you’ll have demon powers which need to be charged up to use them, and how this charge happens depends on your armor.

Victor Vran screen 4

There are many different weapons in the game, each with a unique play-style and special attacks, suited to different monsters and situations. Hammers are slow but do a huge amount of damage, which is handy to get ‘overkill’ on monsters, which you need for killing skeletons. A scythe is perfect for swarms of enemies, since it damages in an arc and gains power on consecutive slashes. A rapier attacks super fast, but deals only a small amount of damage each strike. Ranged weapons are also available: A shotgun does a lot of damage, especially if you use the right rhythm to fire. The lightning gun works great for fast attacks, continuous damage, and damaging multiple enemies in a row. Besides these basic attacks, all weapons have two special attacks that grants effect like knock-back, stun of life steal. The more powerful weapons you’ll find have some additional properties, like increased damage and critical chance. You’ll also be able to craft weapons and other items later in the game.

Next to weapons you can equip armor (your outfit, which is only one item), two consumable potions/bombs, demon powers (magic) with a great variety (both defensive and offensive magic) and destiny cards, which can hugely affect your gameplay. Destiny cards can give your character more critical damage, more chance for critical hits, life steal, armor, damage, etc. When paired with complementary weapons, the combination of cards, outfit and weapons becomes incredibly powerful and well suited to whichever play style you like best.

The central hub of the game is a castle, where you’ll find NPCs to talk to, shops, a crafting system, a map, and a stash for your items. Both inventory and stash are unlimited, and the stash is accessible by other characters on the same account as well. The map will show each region you can fast-travel to, and selecting a region shows the special rewards you can get by completing certain objectives in that region. The objectives are a fun way to learn about the game: ‘break 50 urns’ lets you discover there’s gold & potions to be found by breaking stuff, and ‘kill 25 skeletons with a hammer’ learns you hammers are fine for fighting skeletons. Later on you’ll get very challenging objectives which are pretty much impossible to complete the first time you visit a region.

Victor Vran screen 3

Victor Vran has a ‘codex’ you can look into at any time during the game. The codes contains information about any type of monster you have slain, including it’s weaknesses. Besides that, it contains crafting recipes, information about all items and status effects you’ll encounter, a recap of the story and the possibility to watch cutscenes again. The codex is pretty handy to read every now and then, because you’ll get a lot of information and items during the game, which might be a bit much to absorb all at once.

The game has several difficulty settings, and you can increase the difficulty of an area by activating hexes: spells which de-buff your character (periodically losing some health, for example) but reward extra loot and are sometimes necessary to complete map objectives. Additionally you can create a ‘hardcore character, which can only keep it’s hardcore status as long as it doesn’t die.

Victor Vran can be played in single-player, co-op or online. When playing with a friend you can make powerful characters specialized for a specific role, which feel very powerful and are a lot of fun to play.

Victor Vran screen 2

Conclusion

If you love action RPGs like Diablo, you’ll probably love Victor Vran. The equipment system works very well and is a lot of fun to customize your character to your play-style, and try out different builds. This game has beautiful and dark graphics, music which fits the mood, and great narration. Victor Vran is a good game which is perfectly suited for players looking for a fresh new ARPG challenge, to play by themselves or together with friends or online.

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Rating: 9.0/10 (3 votes cast)
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Victor Vran: Overkill Edition - Review, 9.0 out of 10 based on 3 ratings
Anmaja


I'm a LARP writer, freelance teacher and everlasting PhD student, and an avid gamer. Nowadays I game mostly on PC, but I love my retro playstation 1 & 2 as well :) I like watching anime, movies and series, and read books & comics whenever I have time!

3 Comments

  1. […] game, putting it all in one review would be too long and unclear. Don’t forget to check out the review of the Victor Vran base game, if you haven’t read it […]

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  2. 3rd-strike.com | Victor Vran is going overkill
    February 8, 2018, 20:19

    […] Victor Vran: Overkill Edition, which was released in 2017 is about to save the world on the Nintendo Switch. If you want to know what the game is all about, you can read up on it here. […]

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  3. […] “I’ll be back” might just be the most overused movie quote of the century. In this case however we can all be glad that Victor Vran is back for some more demon slaying goodness. Victor Vran: Overkill Edition is an isometric action RPG which encourages you to kill, slay, dismember and above all send some demons back to where they came from. The game is set to release on Tuesday the 28th of August 2018 for Nintendo Switch. Slay demons by yourself, with one local friend on the couch or up to four friends online. Until then you can put this sixty second movie clip on repeat for your demon killing pleasure. You can also check out our review of the PC edition right here. […]

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