There’s two kinds of games I can’t resist: ridiculous anime fanservice games, since I’ve been cursed by a mummy to play and review them all, and action-RPGs. The latter, sadly, aren’t quite as common as they used to be. Seems like a few years ago you’d have a thousand Diablo clones come out a month, much like MOBAs come out today. Instead, we have to take what we can get here in the 2010, so today we’re going to talk about The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III, the last part of a pretty decent trilogy of action-RPGs from Neocore.
Van Helsing III picks up where the second game left off, with our hero YOURNAME Van Helsing and his ghost sidekick Lady Katarina infiltrating a mad scientist’s lair. There’s plenty of pseudo-Victorian era snark and adventure to go around. Things continue in the usual steampunk fashion, so you can guess how that goes.
Instead, let’s talk about gameplay! Van Helsing III offers an all-new slate of classes, ranging from the assassin Umbralist to the finger-waggling Elementalist. There’s even a robot-piloting engineer, the Phlogistoneer, who focuses on causing mechanical mayhem. Along with the new classes, the skill system has been shaken up as well; while the previous Van Helsing games used a more traditional skill tree system, Van Helsing III uses a sort of “skill hub” system where everything’s accessible at all times. No longer do you have to level prerequisite skills to get to that one gem you really want – just grab it! There’s other nice convenience features, such as the increasingly popular trick of having only one health potion item that simply recharges over time instead of forcing you to buy or find new ones.
The changes are welcome and help freshen the game a bit, particularly since both Van Helsing and its sequel were epic journeys that could keep a dedicated player going for dozens of hours. There’s one small problem, though: you’re no longer able to import your character because, I assume, the underlying class and skill systems are too different to be compatible. The level cap is also a mere 30, while in previous games it was 60, and you start from level 1. Your character feels like a badass from step one, which is nice after the painful beginning you’d have to endure in the first game, but it’s still a bit of dissonance to have to start over entirely. I can’t say I was a big fan of this lack of continuity and it wasn’t very popular with long-term fans of the series either.
So that’s a problem…at least right now, anyway. See, later this year, Neocore plans to release The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut, which merges all three games into one ubergame that you can play through all at once. This is going to use the classes from Van Helsing III and will allow imports, though they won’t transfer older characters over in a complete fashion since the systems have changed so much. I have to have a certain degree of cynicism, but let’s be real: an 80-hour action-RPG that you can play through entirely in cooperative mode would at least merit a look.
Van Helsing III certainly looks and sounds like another entry in the series. The voice acting and music is, as always, is fantastic. Graphics are your usual Van Helsing fare and there’s a fair amount of reused assets. I don’t really mind this, but it’s pretty clear that Neocore was planning on wrapping all the games together for Final Cut from the start and might not have put too much work into new resources for this third game. It’s worth noting that there are technical issues here and there, especially in multiplayer, but unfortunately that’s nothing new to this series; at least Neocore’s been patching the game up to and including adding an in-game bug tracker.
With Final Cut eventually coming out, you’d think I would suggest skipping The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III and waiting – and normally you’d be right! However, there’s one other touch to this: anyone who’s got all three games when Final Cut comes out gets it for free. That means that this is an easy recommendation for fans of the previous two titles, especially since they can be had for a song these days. The fact that it’s a pretty decent action-RPG doesn’t hurt, either, but at the moment I think it’s best to look at Van Helsing III as an investment in the future and a taste of what will be coming later this year. Pick it up, enjoy for now, and wait for the release of the complete story.
