The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Analysis

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Analysis

David Hunter

January 4, 2019

1 Overview

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is a third-person action RPG in the tradition of Diablo. It was developed by NeocoreGames and released in December, 2013.

2 Formal Elements

2.1 Players

In The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, you can control of the son of Abraham Van Helsing, famous as the vampire hunter from Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula. You control this avatar from the traditional 3/4 top down perspective, however the camera actually displays in perspective, rather than in orthographic mode. The camera is not rotatable, but the ground often has more 3D-ness and verticality than is usually found in these kinds of games. Besides controlling the avatar of the son of Abraham Van Helsing, you also have a ghost companion, Katerina. Although she is controlled by the AI, the player may modify the AI behavior, give her different equipment, and level her up in a similar way to Van Helsing.

The main campaign is strictly single player, but multiplayer sessions may be created online.

Your Van Helsing comes in three classes: a traditional ”Hunter” class, who can use swords and guns, ”Thaugmaturge” class, who can use powerful magic, and the ”Archane Mechanic” class, who can use a kind of magical gun or cannon.

2.2 Objectives

The main objective is to defeat an evil scientist who as taken over a city in central Europe. You have been hired by a mysterious client to oust the scientist and rescue the city. While traveling to the city, the only bridge to it gets dynamited, forcing you to make a detour and of course help lots of people and defeat lots of bosses along the way to the city through a different route.

2.3 Rules

2.3.1 Movement

Similarly to other action RPGs, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsinghas severely restricted movement options. Your avatar may move horizontally along the plain, although there are many stairs, hills, and sometimes elevators that you may use to move vertically.

There is no swimming, jumping, dodging, or flying. The player may not move through enemies, unless you use a special dash ability. Enemies may crowd around the player somewhat unrealistically, ignoring each other’s colliders.

2.3.2 Gear, Items, and Inventory

Like many ARPGs, it is all about the loot. There are many different items and pieces of equipment. For weapons, you have the one-handed and two-handed melee or magical items, as well as one-handed and two-handed ranged or magical items. For the most part, these use the common trade of a higher attack frequency with less damage with one-handed weapons for the lower attack frequency but much higher attack damage with two-handed weapons. One melee and one ranged weapon may be equipped at any given time, although many more may be carried.

There are also armor and accessory slots:

1. body armor
2. hat
3. cloak
4. belt
5. gloves
6. boots
7. necklace
8. trophy
9. ring (two may be equipped)

These are accessed by using the right joystick to pick a category on a radial menu; however, this is extremely sticky and imprecise, making it time-consuming and extremely frustrating to manage your inventory.

2.3.3 Crafting

There is a crafting system in The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, but this is never adequately explained, and for the entire game you can safely ignore it. For completeness sake, here is a brief description: you can ”Enhance” weapons and armor by using different essences which are dropped as loot from slain enemies. Essences may themselves by enhanced or combined to create new properties. You can also remove these essences from weapons by dismantling them. Weapons and armor have a limited essence capacity, so you must choose which essence you apply.

2.3.4 Quests

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsingfeatures quests, many of which are optional. Completing the optional quests will give you extra XP and other possible rewards. They may also increase your reputation, allowing you to unlock a perk.

2.4 Procedures

2.4.1 Talking to an NPC

Many times you will be tasked with speaking to an NPC. This is done in the time-honored fashion that has not changed much since Planescape: Torment: You click the interaction button, and you have a simple menu to choose from. You have a few points in the story where your choices may lead to a different path or influence later play, but these are very small changes.

2.4.2 Searching an Area & Scavenging

Several quests involve gathering a certain number of items, and this means exploring all the regions or locations in an area. They may be laying around, they may be in containers, or it might be necessary to kill a particular type of enemy.

2.4.3 Killing a Boss / Mob

There are several bosses spread throughout the game world of The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. Most of them are optional, and will give you a lot of XP, gold, items, and a boost to your reputation. They usually have special abilities, such as draining your mana, spawning walls which block your escape, health regeneration, etc, and naturally have a huge amount of health.

There are hundreds of mobs of different monsters around the world, ranging in size from a handful to several dozen creatures. While attacking either a boss or a mob, you can choose from melee or ranged attacks, and also from different styles of attack. Each attack has three different variations which can be unlocked, and which consume rage when used. However, this is also never clearly explained and I played most of the game without realizing it.

2.4.4 Managing Inventory

This is one of the most annoying parts that you will have to regularly engage in. You start up with 50 inventory slots, but this is deceiving because it seems that items may take up more than one slot. You can also transfer items to Katerina, who can be sent to the shop to sell her items. However, this is also never adequately explained. There is a perk which will allow you to get 100 inventory slots, so if you don’t realize you can do the above, you could invest in this perk. I must reiterate that managing inventory is a huge pain in the ass. Not only do you have quite limited space considering the amount of items that will drop (even at low luck levels), but the using the controller to access your items and check them out is more or less broken.

You use the right joystick and push it towards one of the categories along the radial menu. There are ten item categories, which means you have 36^∘ for each category. When you select one category, it is extremely sticky, so even when you move the position of your joystick much more than 36^∘ away from that category, it remains selected. Even for angles greater than 50^∘ or 60^∘ different than the selected category, no change is shown. Although 36^∘ is not a huge range to aim for when moving your joystick, it is not small either. Still, the game cannot detect where you are aiming accurately, and since the categories are so sticky, it is difficult to change the category to the one you desired.

2.4.5 Leveling up

Each time you kill a monster or complete a quest, you receive XP, which will increase your level after you receive a certain amount. Your companion can also level up in the same way. Each time you level up, you will receive 3 skill points and 5 stat points. Skill points are of course used to increase skills, although skills with a higher level requirement need two skill points.

There are four stats you may invest in, two types of skills (one for melee and one for ranged) with 11 skills each (some of which are passive stat boosts), 10 auras which are passive stat boosts, and 7 tricks, which are also basically passive skills.

There are also perks, which become available after increasing your reputation. These could be increasing the effect of potions, giving your character a one time gift of extra skill points, decreasing the level requirements for weapons, or others.

2.5 Resources

In The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, like in many RPG games, there are numerous resources.

2.5.1 Tangible Resources

1. Gold: Gold is dropped by slain monsters, found in loot containers, and also received as a reward for completing quests.
2. Essences: Essences are also dropped from slain monsters and found in loot containers. They can be used to modify weapons and armor.
3. Potions: Potions can be found around the game world in loot contains, and are also dropped by slain monsters. You may also purchase them from merchants. The two main potions are health and mana, although a few unique ones also exist.
4. Trophies: These are also dropped from slain enemies. Like the trophies in The Witcher franchise, they are body parts which give some bonuses to different stats, increasing max health or mana, increasing attack speed, granting fire or ice damage, etc.
5. Armor, Weapons, and Accessories: Guess what, these also drop from slain enemies, can be purchased from shops, and found in crates around the game world.

2.5.2 Intangible Resources

1. Player and Companion Level: As you earn XP, your level will increase. This unlocks some skills and allows you to use better equipment.
2. Player and Katerina XP: Both Van Helsing and his companion Katerina gain XP from killing enemies. Van Helsing further gains it by complete quests.
3. Reputation: This is gained by killing powerful enemies
4. Skill Levels and Points: Each skill has level requirements and other prerequisites. By investing skill points in a skill, you increase certain aspects of the skill, either its potency, area of effect, duration, or possibly reduce its man/rage cost or cooldown period.
5. Stat Levels and Points: By investing stat points in a stat, you increase the numerical value of the stat, which increases other stats which are dependent on it. For example, by increasing the Body stat you increase the physical damage the character can do in melee, their health, and their defensive abilities, while increasing Dexterity increases ranged damage, chance to dodge, etc.
6. Perks and Perk Points: Perks are either one time gifts of skill points or passive stat boosters.
7. Reputation: This is increased by killing bosses and powerful optional monsters throughout the game world.
8. Health: When this drops to 0, you will respawn at the nearest town.
9. Mana: Used to cast spells and for special attacks.
10. Rage: This builds as you kill enemies, and can be consumed in a special attack.
11. Item Stats: Each item has a handful of stats, which like most of the game mechanics are never adequately explained. Weapons have a damage range, and may have bonuses to health, health regeneration, luck, reduced ability cooldown times, or many others. Armor and accessories have similar stats, but with a protection rating instead.

2.6 Conflicts

The main conflict in terms of story and gameplay is player versus environment. There are many enemies and monsters that fill each area, and they will attack you once you come into range, then follow you for quite a distance before stopping.

2.6.1 Point Investment

You cannot unlock all skills to their max during a full game, so you must choose skills to invest in that match your playstyle and equipment.

2.7 Boundaries

As mentioned before, movement does have a somewhat greater sense of verticality due to the way the base layer is allowed to move up and down, but there is no jumping, swimming, or other types of movement allowed. Further, the maps are of the historical rooms/dungeons plus corridors variety so commonly found in games of this genre.

2.7.1 Inventory

Only 50 item slots exist for the player, plus another 50 for your ghost companion, although you can get 50 more from a perk. You can only have one of each item type equipped at any given time, with the exception of the rings, although it is difficult to notice this and it is not explained or pointed out.

2.7.2 Skills

You cannot max out all skills in a single playthrough, and although you might be able to unlock the base versions of all the skills, you cannot have them all equipped at the same time. At most six skills may be equipped, one mapped to each of the face buttons on a controller, and the other two to the right bumper and right trigger. This too has persistent bugs that make it annoying to play: frequently your mapped skills will become unmapped, forcing you to return to the skill menu and manually mapping them to specific buttons again. In addition, when you switch from melee to ranged weapons, certain skills that are available for both modes get moved to different buttons. The reasoning is never explained, and it is just something you have to put up with.

2.8 Outcomes

There is only one outcome: you defeat the evil scientist who was terrorizing the city of Borgovia.

3 Dynamic Elements

Unlike many ARPGs, there is no grinding in The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. When you kill a monster, that monster will never respawn in that area again, so when you clear an area, it stays cleared for the whole game. This removes the possibility of many dynamic elements related to how many monsters spawn in and what kind of monsters spawn in. There is no day/night cycle, nor weather cycle, and you do not gain or lose reputation with any NPCs nor factions.

3.1 Patterns

This section focuses on game patterns as discussed by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans in Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.

3.1.1 Slow Cycle

During one section of game play, waves of enemies will attack your base, and you must defend against them.

3.1.2 Stopping Mechanism

As in many RPGs, this is seen in cooldown mechanisms on abilities and potions.

3.1.3 Escalating Challenge

The number and power of enemies generally tends to increase over the course of the game.

3.1.4 Worker Placement

During the previously described tower defense section, you may place different traps along different routes which enemies may travel to reach your base. Since the gates used during each wave are different, you may try to rearrange the traps in between waves, and also change the place that Van Helsing is focused on in order to achieve greater or more effective coverage.

3.1.5 Dynamic Friction

This is mostly seen in the increasing XP and skill point requirements as you level up and try to unlock higher skills.

3.1.6 Trade

Given the amount of loot that drops, you must trade it in or you will be come woefully short on cash and will not be able to buy enough health potions throughout the game. There is almost no other use for money, however, as the merchants almost never have loot better than what can be found by killing monsters, and there is little point in upgrading your armor or weapons through infusing them with essences.

4 Dramatic Elements

Although there is a story and there are characters, like in many ARPGs, nobody is playing the game for the characters or the story.

4.1 Characters

Van Helsing is poorly characterized, while his ghost companion Katerina has a snide sarcastic personality. Almost all the other characters have no personality, just a few lines of dialogue that convey information and flavor text.

4.2 Story

As mentioned before, the story is about Van Helsing being called in to save the city of Borgovia from the machinations of an evil scientist who is making machines. That terrible pun is also about as clever as the writing throughout the game, which makes lots of tongue in check references to The Lord of the Rings movies, Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, and many, many other cultural and intellectual properties.

Anyway. As the bridge that leads to the city is destroyed in front of your eyes, you journey to a village to find someone who can lead you to the city. This person is out on business, and, it should go without saying, you need to go rescue them. They give you their advice, and you spend the rest of the first half of the game fighting through different areas to make it to the city. The last half of the game is spent in many different sections of Borgovia itself, first tracking down your client, then dismantling the evil scientist’s machines and machinations one by one. The evil scientist paraphrase lines from pop culture all through the fight, perhaps in an attempt to alleviate some of the tedium of the fight. There is something of a cliff hanger or hint at the sequels at the end, when someone makes cryptic comments about something that I really don’t care about anymore.

5 Conclusion

Like their other title, King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing presents a few interesting twists (such as having a permanent AI companion) on a tried-and-true formula. Unfortunately, it shares many of the flaws that King Arthur: The Roleplaying Wargame does: flawed gameplay mechanics, a few persistent bugs, and UI woes. Like their other title, it might be worth checking out if you are a fan of the property or a huge fan of Neocore. If you prefer innovative gameplay, deep leveling systems, fun combat that keeps you on your toes, and a good story, then you should stay away.