Review: The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing (2013)

• May 15, 2014
• James Skemp
• gaming, review

An enjoyable hack and slash dungeon crawler

Having recently built a gaming PC I had to think hard about what game(s) I would initially pick up. Since Diablo II was such an enjoyable game, and one of my most memorable experiences when I was PC gaming, I initially looked at Diablo III. However, the current state of the game, and knowing that eventually the DLC and base game would be selling for half the price, led me to look elsewhere.

Since The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was available for half off a few weekends ago, I decided to pick it up and start with it.

The game is actually fairly enjoyable. There are only a few major hubs that you'll visit, with a little under a dozen enemy-populated areas for each. The main character is limited to level 30 (which I reached shortly before the final boss, having done almost all of the sidequests), and the companion character to level 25.

In addition to the normal crawling, killing, and looting, since both characters are always available (you only play as one), there's also a nice amount of banter between the two characters. The tiers of loot are fairly limited, but there's enough variety that I found myself making tough calls on what equipment I wanted to keep, and what I wanted to sell.

There's both ability points to spend at each level, as well as skill points, and even reputation points for killing more unique or higher classed enemies. New reputation-based skills are unlocked after certain points (ability points at a certain level, for example), which makes for some rather tough choices on what to purchase, since you can only select 10, of at least 20.

Having put a little under 19 hours into the game, I can safely said it was definitely worth the price paid, and would have been worth the full price. While I won't be doing so (I have a lot of PC-only games to catch up on), there's two additional character classes that I could go through the game with, to add to the replayability.

I recommend The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, and give it 4 of 5 stars.

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