“This is incredible, I’m just standing here, holding the shift, and shoot, and don’t have to move at all. “
“Well, good job.”
“Yes, but I’m not really playing a game now, am I? Was it always so boring? Or did we just overdose on Helsing?”
“Let’s try to come up with a structured set of criticism later so we know if our dislike is emotional or rational.”
“Deal.”
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III is the third instalment in the epic ARPG series. The story continues where part II left off, you are after the person / thing that turned out to be the new villain after you defeated the person / thing you thought to be the main villain.
This time, you can choose from a whopping six different classes (whoa, developers, slow down!), but unfortunately, you can’t continue with your character from the first two, you have to start a new one. The structure and gameplay is very similar to the previous games, in fact, I think it’s exactly the same as Van Helsing II. I would definitely read our previous reviews of the first and second game first, because I’m not going to bore ourselves by repeating the introduction.
You are still Van Helsing, son of the other Van Helsing (aren’t all Van Helsings a son of a different Van Helsing?), and you are still occasionally helping the resistance of Borgovia, but by this game you are mostly just living in their basement and concentrating on you own personal vengeance quest. You fight monsters so you can level up, gain skills, increase attributes, get better gear.
The Good
Honestly, the best thing about Van Helsing III is Van Helsing I and II. I really liked those two games, so the enthusiasm carried over to this one for a while. Artwork and music and world is still great and unique, humor is still there. The look of the maps is fresh and unique.
They got rid of some of the unnecessary stuff from the second game, like the runes or scrolls, and there are fewer lazy reference joke this time around. Most of these reductions were very much welcome by us.
One other thing to mention, although it’s a bit weird to praise a game for this reason, it is not as buggy as the other two games. Bugs still occurred, for example, right in the very first scene, my character was inexplicably invisible, so I had to restart the game, and the skills were also invisible from the skill tree so I had to find a .cfg file and modify it in the game library. Doesn’t sound great, right? Well, for a Van Helsing game, this is as good as it gets!
The Bad
Van Helsing III suffers from the same mistake all the ARPGs have (except for Diablo II and Van Helsing I-II), namely that it’s too easy and forgiving. That’s the main issue with the game. We started on Hard difficulty setting, but it was child’s play. We hardly ever died, and the only challenge the monsters presented was how boring they are to get rid of. It was especially prevalent in the tower defense sections, which, silly as they were from a story perspective, worked great mechanically in the previous game, but here it was so boring we just stopped doing them after one measly battle. You can also just respawn for free in the middle of the bossfights, which takes away any remaining sense of urgency or danger.
Not only is the game very easy to beat, it’s very simple too. They got rid of a huge chunk of mechanisms from Van Helsing II, which, as I mentioned before, could be great, god knows that game is boggled down by it’s lack of focus, but they went way too far in one area: they completely mutilated the skill tree. I think this is the simplest skill “tree” I have ever seen in an ARPG, skill bush or skill flower would be a better description. You basically have 8 usable skills, and that’s it. Not only are they few in numbers, they were quite boring as well. At least for my Bounty Hunter character. I had a normal shot, a poison shot, and an ice shot, that’s it. They all work very similarly. So instead of summoning your three different types of automatons and then sending an artillery strike and a freeze grenade and an electric blast and then erecting a defensive barrier while you are waiting for cooldowns, like I used to do in Van Helsing II, I just stood in one place and kept my mouse button pressed, while hovering the cursor over enemies.
On the other hand, there are unnecessary stuff they should have cut from the game. Your pokémon is even more stupid to have now that you can’t even summon it in battle. The command table missions are still a waste of time, and somehow they are even less exciting than before.
The story is boring and incoherent, the villain is frankly silly. I still don’t know what / how / why they wanted to achieve. You jump through various set pieces, but you never feel like you are advancing or that the world is connected, because every closed off map starts and ends with a portal, so it could be anywhere. There are presumably reasons to why you are there, we will never know. The maps look cool, unique, really, kudos to the art department, but the design is terrible. Example: you explore the whole map, following your gamer instincts, you start with the areas AWAY from the main story mission of course, you find an NPC, there is a boring dialogue, then you go back to the main quest, there is a boulder in front of a bridge, the game informs you you have to get explosives, so you track back to the NPC, over the completely empty map, get the explosives (you simply have to ask for it, and they give it to you), and then you track back in the still empty area, and blow up the boulder. Three minutes of your life gone. And almost every map has a moment like this, when you inexplicably have to walk over long distances for no apparent reason.
The monsters are also not as weird and unique as in the first two installments. Instead of werewolves and automatons and frog people and super-annoying harpies and gentleman ghouls and those giant centaur-like thingies shooting with a mortar, we now have zombies, and… uhmm, other things, I presume. I can’t remember. And it wasn’t that long ago! It feels much more cliched and tired. There is one level, a cemetery, with zombies, and they respawn and slowly walk away and it’s terrible. Well, I guess you had to be there to appreciate this story. I’m second-guessing myself a bit here, because looking at the pictures, the monsters look interesting. Meh.
We praised the previous two games for the sensible scale of the conflict. There is precisely one game that can get away with the ultimate world shattering time and space consuming uber villain threatening the whole reality, and that is Diablo II. Every other game should just stick to a lower scale danger. It worked great in Van Helsing I and II, human villains with aims and a healthy can-do attitude were what you fought against. Here? We are going full time and space continuum dinosaur.
Couple of other smaller issues we had with the game:
- No set items in an ARPG constitutes as a wtf-situation.
- Important story dialogue often happens during battles when it is impossible to pay attention to it, and sometimes it’s even muted, because, you know, a fight is going on.
- One of us, khm, did not like the Umbralist class because it looked too similar to the main villain. Which is true and weird. We kept expecting some big reveal at the end, and it never came.
The Co-Op
It’s an ARPG, the co-op is mostly what you could expect, with two caveats. One, I really like the resurrect the other option during a fight, even though it was not as important in this game, since, as I mentioned above, free respawn for everyone. Two, we did not think that our two characters synergized very well (Umbralist and Bounty Hunter). Could be just an unlucky pairing, or it could be that the game was too easy for us to consider discussing what to do in detail, but it was not quite as tactical as the previous games in the series.
The Recommendation
Recommending The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III is an impossible task. We did not have a terrible time with it, but it’s exactly like most of the other ARPGs out there we tend not to like. It’s too short and simple. However, we do wholeheartedly recommend Van Helsing I and II, but if you play those games, chances are you won’t be able to resist seeing the end of the story. So we recommend the trilogy as a whole, even if the third one is not a good game on its own. You can also look at it as one huge 40-hours long game, where the closing chapter is somewhat lackluster.
Info
| Release Year | 2015 |
| Genre | ARPG |
| Difficulty | Easy |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 10 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Mediocre |
| Story | Bad |
| Co-Operation | Mediocre |