Disappointment is the only word that comes to mind when I think of The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing: Final Cut. Not because it’s a bad game — not even close. In fact, it’s through and through a decent RPG with a cool set up and fun gameplay. What disappointed me was the lackluster direction this otherwise great game took. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing: Final Cut (Which I will now refer to as Van Helsing: Final Cut for both your sake and mine) is an isometric hack and slash RPG — much like Diablo, which it is so often compared to — created by Neocore Games. Van Helsing: Final Cut is sort of the crowning jewel in the Van Helsing trilogy. It isn’t its own original game, rather it is the trilogy bundled together into one continuous story running on the Van Helsing III engine (At least I think? The Steam description is a little vague). Not a bad idea. In fact, the entire concept of Van Helsing isn’t a bad idea, either. The idea of playing as a famous vampire/monster hunter is something I’ve always wanted in a video game — Except you don’t play as Abraham Van Helsing. You play as his nameless, faceless son.
Okay, not as cool, but I suppose it allows the player to insert themselves into the role easier. The story follows Van Helsing and his ghostly companion, Katarina (Who is also Russian). Katarina is bound to serve Van Helsing for… Some reason. I’m pretty sure it’s explained in the first 30 seconds of the story, but I honestly don’t even remember. That’s the first issue with Van Helsing: The story is somewhat forgettable. It’s serviceable as a means for driving and motivating Van Helsing, but that’s it. I didn’t find myself terribly invested in the actual plot. I just wanted to hunt monsters!
Van Helsing and Katarina are on their way to the (fictional) region of Borgovia, which is in dire need of help after an evil professor named Fulmigati has taken over and oppressed the good citizens. Before they can make it to the capital city of Borgova (Creative name, right?), Van Helsing and Katarina are ambushed by bandits and their way to the city is cut off. This leads them on a journey to find a way into Borgova and stop the mad genius.
This setup wasn’t bad. You’re started off in a forest region where you must fight bandits, weird ghoul things, and hordes of werewolves. Hordes of werewolves. How cool does that sound?! It sounds pretty cool, and it is pretty cool. The first chapter of Van Helsing: Final Cut was easily my favorite. It had everything I wanted: Dark forests, ghosts, and creative monsters.
There are six playable classes in Van Helsing: Final Cut, all of which are very creative spins on typical RPG classes. They all have unique powers and they all look awesome. The gameplay is the standard hack and slash RPG fare. You click around to move, attack, perform actions, and you can bind the number keys to skills. Katarina also acts as a constant companion who will help you fight off enemies and give you stat boosts. Van Helsing is one of those games that decides that instead of throwing a handful of tougher enemies at you, it has to throw a billion weak enemies at you. This is a bit off-putting. I think Diablo nailed the balance between the number of enemies and their difficulty. This game kind of goes all out. And because of this, when enemies do become more challenging it’s a total nightmare trying to kill them all.
You can learn a ridiculous variety of skills with each class in Van Helsing: Final Cut. So many, in fact, that it’s quite daunting. The sheer amount of skills, sub skills, passive skills, and sub passive skills just blows my mind. I’m 25 hours in at the time of writing this and I’m still overwhelmed by it all. I really can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand it allows a great amount of customization and fine tuning for your class, but on the other hand it makes you want to rip your hair out because of how in depth it is. I think the worst part about it is the “power ups.” These are little sub skills that can give boosts to your main skills. You can activate these with Rage, a meter you fill up by killing enemies.
The issue I take with these power up skills is that you have to assign rage to each power up before using the skill, and then if you assign to more than one skill, simply using one skill will erase all of the power up “allocation,” if you will. Why is that necessary? Why does the game give me the incentive to plan ahead by pre-assigning rage to different power ups, only to take that away when I use one skill. It resulted in me constantly mashing the A, S, and D keys to activate power ups before using one skill during combat. That’s a chore. Maybe I’m missing something, but I feel like if these power ups had simply been more expensive, passive boosts to your skills, it would’ve made combat a bit more enjoyable.
After the first chapter is when you enter Borgova. Inside you find an underground resistance led by a… Bela Lugosi-esque vampire? A bit tongue-in-cheek, but nothing horrible. The rest of the Van Helsing I arc involves running missions for this resistance in an attempt to finally get at Fulmigati and stop him. It’s learned quite early in the game that our villain has created an army of horrible abominations and cyborgs. Not exactly traditional monsters, but a nice twist nonetheless. It took a while for me to realize, but a good majority of the game is running around a steampunk city fighting cyborg creatures. What happened to the werewolves, ghosts, and ghouls? You do occasionally enter this odd netherworld known as the Ink. These areas offer a bit of variety, but they’re short and get tiring fast.
This is where Van Helsing: Final Cut starts taking a nosedive. After running through countless dark ally ways, sewer systems, and factories, I was getting fed up. I wanted the dark forest back, I wanted the swamp back, I wanted the gothic feeling back — Not this weird steampunk stuff. After finally getting through the first third of the game and defeating Fulmigati, I had assumed Van Helsing II would take me someplace else. Wrong. An exiled general comes back and raises the remains of Fulmigati’s army to take over Borgova for himself. Same setting, same antagonists. You do, however, get to go out into the wilderness and fight some more mythical creatures in the Van Helsing II story. There’s a nice snowy mountain area in the beginning that I was particularly fond of.
But this doesn’t change the fact that Van Helsing‘s story jumps the shark after the first story arc, and it honestly put me off. The first hour of the second part of the story (ie, Van Helsing II) is a huge, tedious section where you must make a final defense against the cybernetic army. This involves running around the same giant map running errands for your commander while occasionally fighting off waves of enemies. If that wasn’t bad enough, the entire tone of the game makes a complete 180. I swear this entire section was a joke or something.
Suddenly the game was making a ton of random pop culture references, including a lengthy conversation where Van Helsing’s commander tells him he must go save a soldier by the name of Private Bryan (wink wink nudge nudge). When Van Helsing asks why he must sacrifice time and possibly lives to save one pointless, unimportant soldier’s life, the commander basically replies “Because you just have to.” While that’s admittedly a goofy satire, what on earth is it doing here? And while we’re at it, there’s even a Harry Potter reference about a half hour after that! Oh, and Fulmigati constantly quotes cheesy, generic bad guy lines from movies while you fight him in the climax of the first third.
What happened to this game?? The story was fairly serious in the first third, but now suddenly we’re making in-jokes and basically laughing at war. It went from a dark story about monsters and monster hunting to a dark comedy in a matter of minutes. This left me completely baffled. It was at this moment it hit me like a brick wall: This game had disappointed me. I went in expecting a story about monster hunting, and instead I got this crazy story about a steampunk monster hunter\vampire\cyborg war. If you were to take out every single reference to Van Helsing, it would still make complete sense. That’s the biggest issue. Why couldn’t we have had the classic Van Helsing? I want to explore castles and fight vampires. I want to explore abandoned villages filled with zombies and ghosts. Would we not be able to get enough content out of that? I don’t know, but this story has absolutely no reason to even have the name Van Helsing attached to it.
The real saving grace from a narrative point of view is definitely Van Helsing and Katarina themselves; they really make a likeable duo. Van Helsing is deadpan and overly serious, while Katarina is more sassy and irritable. I found myself genuinely enjoying their exchanges. It was especially funny hearing Katarina berate Van Helsing for giving money to beggars, calling him a gullible idiot.
Something interesting that’s available in Van Helsing: Final Cut is a mode that allows you to play randomly generated scenarios. That’s a good way to add some replay value and continue gaining experience with your characters even after finishing the main game. On a final note, Van Helsing: Final Cut has 4-player co-op. It works, but it’s not great. My friends and I struggled to connect with each other, and when we finally did we found that progressing quests was a little buggy with more than one person playing.
So in the end, The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing: Final Cut… Well, I wanted to like it more. At its core, it’s a good game, but the story completely jumps the shark after the first third and it becomes absolutely ridiculous. If you can see passed that, then I would recommend it. It’s got some great RPG elements, a likeable main duo, and over 50 hours of gameplay. The story and direction really disappointed me, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to finish it.
A PC code for The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing: Final Cut was provided by Neocore Games for the purpose of this review