Developer: NeocoreGames
Publisher: NeocoreGames
Platform: PC
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III – Review
It’s been about a year since we checked out The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II, and now it’s time for the third and final installment in the series. Start off where you ended in the previous game and uncover the story and secure Borgovia once and for all.
Story
The story in the third game of course builds further upon the story of the second and first game. At the end of the previous game, you finally ended General Harker’s life and thought you saved the land for good this time… But just like the first game, someone else takes his place, it’s Prisoner Seven. Once your trusty ally in the second game. Prisoner Seven has escaped into the depths of the otherworld, and you’re determined to finish the job and kill him. On top of that, the city started to get threatened by “The Cult of Seven”.
You decide to go after The Cult of Seven and after some digging around, you find out they’re related to Prisoner Seven, who would’ve guessed? You manage to destroy the Cult, but you must still cut off the head of this mad scientist. Prisoner Seven has hid himself in the deepest cracks of the Ink, somewhere only immortals could pass. But you gain passage by a trial by combat and decide to face Prisoner Seven in his own lair.
When you compare this story to the previous games, it’s pretty much no good at all. The story seems very rushed and you have to do things when you’re not even sure why or what is happening. It mainly consists of “go kill this guy” and “oh, now you have to kill the next guy until you get to the main guy”. The campaign is also very short, it can be completed in about 4-5 hours depending on difficulty and thoroughness throughout the levels.
Graphics
Graphics wise, Van Helsing III lives up to its name. The environment isn’t the greatest in some scenarios, but abilities, explosions and weather look very awesome. One major flaw which has been seen throughout the series however is the poor optimization. The game would often drop to about 20-30 even on medium settings with quite a good setup if I say so myself.
Sound
The sound and sound effects also live up to their reputation. The music is still very awesome and beautiful and it feels really epic in some scenarios. It’s also easy to fall in love with the main menu music, which is simply great. Sound effects and narration are also pretty nice. The only weird thing is Prisoner Seven’s voice, he kind of sounds like the sound you get when you try to make as deep of a voice as possible, which is kind of weird and cool at the same time…
Gameplay
The Van Helsing games are pretty much your typical ARPG, you move with the mouse and use left and right click for your most used attacks and have some other attacks to help you out. You level up by killing monsters and completing quests, allowing you to spend skill points (3 per level) and character points, which you can increase stats with. You can spend character points in Body (melee damage and HP), Dexterity (ranged damage and dodge), Willpower (mana and spellpower) or Luck (gold find, magic find, dodge and critical hit damage).
Right off the bat in the character creation screen, you’re greeted with completely new characters compared to previous games. The Elementalist, who is a fragile but very powerful spell caster, Protector, who is a heavily armored melee fighter, master of sword and shield, the Bounty Hunter, expert on firearms and mechanical helpers, the Umbralist, a master of shadows, the Phlogistoneer, basically an engineer in a machine suit and the Constructor, a master contraptionist who rather lets his mechanical minions fight for him.
These classes are all very different from what we’ve seen before, especially from the second game. The second game started at level 30 where the first game left off and the level cap was 60. However, for this game the developers decided to start from 1 again, which makes importing a previous character (which is a pain) pretty useless.
In terms of difficulty, you can make a Casual, Normal, Hard, Heroic or Fearless character. You can later adjust this in-game if it’s too hard or too easy. Harder difficulties will reward more loot and experience. You also have the options to make a hardcore character, which basically means if you die once it’s over.
Another big issue is the lack of skills and specialization. Van Helsing II had a great (but difficult to master) skill system which basically allowed over 20 builds, making most classes capable to be either melee or ranged classes. They completely removed this and toned down the skill tree a lot, containing only about 8 skills and a couple of auras, and most of them are useless. You can pretty much complete the game with only 2 skills. They even removed the ability to buy potions, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but some auras even still have an effect that “increases potion drop”, copy paste error, someone? You now have a potion that sits there permanently and even automatically triggers when you get low.
The issues don’t stop there. An error that occurred a lot on my part is that when launching the game, an error would pop up that the game wasn’t launched via Steam. No big deal, right? When making a character and starting to play, your progress is saved locally. The next time you launch and it actually detects Steam, instead of taking your local copy and linking it to Steam, it just deletes your local character, forcing you to make a new one. Maybe this is an issue on Steam’s side, maybe on the developers’ side, however, it shouldn’t be happening!
Story mode wise, you have some side missions and mini-campaigns. You have a chimera, the command post and other problems in the HQ. The chimera is a beast you’ve caught in the second game and you can send it out for missions and it will bring back rewards in return. The command post is pretty similar, you send out troops with a commander on missions and they bring back items, experience and money. There’s also a little tower-defense minigame which sometimes appears, which is pretty fun.
In terms of other end-game enhancements you can use various NPC’s in the HQ. There’s the Artifact Forge, where you can destroy items you no longer need and attempt to merge their enchantments onto an item you want it to. Further there’s the Laboratory where you can fill essence slots (some gear pieces have essence slots) with essences you find or craft allowing you to add extra stats onto an item. You can also break down unwanted essences and merge them together if you wish to do so.
Talking about NPC’s, in the second game Runecrafting was added, which was an extra way to improve your items. However, this function has been deleted again in the third game, did the developers realize it was useless or not needed?
Furthermore, you can reset all of your skills and character points to try out new builds, gamble your money for random items or buy random enchants for your items.
Last but not least, the game modes, where something appears to have disappeared as well… the Endless Story Mode. You have the main story mode, which is pretty self-explanatory and scenario’s, where you can play a randomly generated mini-campaign in random levels. These are basically your go-to place to farm gear. There’s also a co-op mode where you can play the story or nightmare scenarios, which are harder scenarios. You can also play PvP: Touchdown, which is pretty much capture the flag but there’s only 1 flag in the middle and Battle Royale, a free for all arena where you can battle it out as real men and women!
Conclusion
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III brings us the third and final chapter in the Van Helsing series. While it might seem okay for most players, fans who have played the previous games countless of hours will agree that this game is very sub-par compared to the other ones. A lot of features and flexibility has gone missing, however, the tutorials are better than ever for new players and the music is still great.
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