Almost 5 years ago a completely unexpected action RPG came out. The genre was back on the rise after the success of Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2, but people wanted to see it evolve even more. Add more little weird touches, more curious takes on the same basic mechanics and gameplay loop. Darksiders 2, an action adventure at core, had lots of action RPG elements to it and Borderlands were a huge success at mixing FPS and action RPG. So there was The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, from rather unknown NeocoreGames, who had previously released rather mediocre series King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame. And the game was surprisingly fun. I mean, it wasn’t stellar, it didn’t revolutionize the genre or anything, but there were small touches that made the game work a bit closer to how a story driven action RPG would, like The Witcher, yet it remained at its core a pure monster killing loot gathering aRPG in all its simplicity.
But it was meant to be the first of 3 games. And the games that followed… well… Let’s just say, I’m not exactly sure the Final Cut of the series, that mixes all 3 games into one, is the cut I would’ve went with.
Since the game is just all 3 games done in a row, but with all the systems and mechanics from the third one, let me go through each and every game, especially if you find one of them in your library from some random game bundle you got many years ago.
The original Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is still a fun mix of steampunk and classic monster hunting adventuring. It has a clear nice pace and while its story isn’t going to rock your world, the main characters of Van Helsing and his ghost partner Katarina and their constant banter are genuinely amusing. You see, one of the main features of the series is the fact that you have an AI partner that doesn’t just do the job of a “pet” from many modern aRPGs, who would be carrying your loot and running off to sell it at a press of a button, but also can fight or support your main character and has her own story. It’s a bit of a buddy cop situation and it usually works in an entertaining way. Another amazing part of the first game is the lack of classes (a few were added as DLCs, but I’d say – they’re not the point) and your main class of monster hunter is versatile and can switch from melee to ranged at a press of a button… Except, in Final Cut this isn’t true anymore – instead you get 6 boring usual aRPG classes which work exactly like some “knight” and “rogue” would, with no mode switching, except with some steampunk style changes. Which doesn’t just make some enemies not really work anymore, but also turns a creative game into “yet another mediocre aRPG”. The game is also not particularly hard on dumb joke pop-culture references, but there are more of them then I would’ve preferred and closer to the end you get, more of them pop up.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II is where things get really weird. You start of the game with a tedious map you need to run back and forth in, it introduces boring villains and hilariously bad and badly voiced allies and almost immediately goes head first into jokes and pop culture references. It actually gets somewhat interesting somewhere in the middle of the game, but that interesting part gets stupid and ends pretty quickly with you being thrust yet again into the same boring map from the start of the game, you have to run back and forth multiple times yet again. Game also introduces several rather pointless additions, like people you can send to do missions for you (sometimes to avoid playing the tower defense missions, which have been made more fun in Final Cut, it seems). If you were expecting a good development of the ideas and the pacing of the original game, you’d be extremely disappointed.
And finally we get to The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III, which seems to understand that the direction of II was a mistake, but doesn’t really know what to do about it. This is also the game where the boring classes of Final cut get introduced and overwrite the original ones. There are attempts at “incredible adventuring”, with more varied and creative locations, but they don’t really feel exciting by now. There are, finally, some character development moments for the main cast, but those are also too little too late. I feel like III could’ve been a good sequel to the original game, if the developers knew what to do with what they had and didn’t instead go in the direction of making “yet another aRPG”. Oh and pop culture references get really unbearable here.
In Final Cut all of the above is just lumped together and goes in chronological order. Most of the DLC content, where applicable, seems to be here, including the utterly pointless story DLC to the second game that you cannot avoid now as it’s a main quest. Most things are updated to work and look like they were in III, with the home base layout being very different from how it was in the original. And also there’re a bunch of “Adventure mode” things, which is basically just boring generated dungeon stuff with “challenges” and “dailies” and other boring things.
I would still recommend checking out the first game. It’s rather average, but on the good side of average and it did attempt some very interesting things. And most importantly, it doesn’t feel boring at its core. But Final Cut does. It feels boring, forgettable, an inferior version of a superior idea that the developers once had. And it’s a real shame.
P.S. The music in the series is pretty great, though. But you can experience the best of it in the first game anyway.