“Haha, I’m finally at 10,000 DPS! Well, 8,500 DPH, but the cooldown is 0.77 seconds and I’m doing it constantly.”
“Good for you. I’m at 15,000.”
“Damnit. Well, it must be all my robots doing all the damage off-screen. Still. How on earth are you doing that?”
“I put a lot on willpower.”
“What? Why? That does not increase your skills. I don’t think so. It’s most probably weapon damage, and that scales with dexterity.”
“Yeah but I always put a lot on willpower…. Eh, OK, let me re-spec real quick. Huh, you’re right. I’m at 19,000 now.”
The follow-up to the critically praised (at least praised by us) The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, aptly called The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II, is even more incredible, more adventurous, and more Helsing than its predecessor.
The story starts immediately after the events of the first game, following the final boss fight. Keeping it vague to avoid spoilers, let’s just say that you defeated the person / thing at the end of the first game, but now it turns out that due to reasons there is another person / thing who also poses a threat to the city you are protecting. You can actually import your character from the first game, and continue your adventures with that, keeping your items, attributes, skill trees intact. (The level cap is increased to 60 in this game.)
You and your ghostly companion Katarina (and maybe a couple of your twin brothers with their individual ghost companions also called Katarina) stand against an endless horde of beasts, machine men, and ethereal beings. Your mission is to aid the resistance of Borgovia in their fight against the evil General Harker by fighting / collecting / destroying various things in various locations. Unlike the first game when you were traveling to your destination for at least the first half, here, you start in the headquarters of the secret resistance organisation, and go on missions from there.
The core is a standard ARPG, very similar to the first game, so you level up, gain skills, collect items, find the best combos, etc. (I recommend reading our review of the first game, I’m not going to repeat everything here.) For the second instalment, they added so much to the gameplay it can make your head hurt. In fact, without taking sides on whether that’s a good or bad thing, let me just add a non-standard section here called Hypothesized Pitch Meeting so we can marvel at the sheer amount of ideas.
Hypothesized Pitch Meeting
– So, you remember how the first Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was kinda packed for a 15 hours game?
– What do you mean?
– Well, we did not only do all the required ARPG stuff like you know skill trees and auras and attributes and item sets and crafting and item improvement…
– Yes…?
– … but we also gave players an NPC that follows them and has their own inventory and skills and attributes and combat tactics that players can fine-tune, there was a tower defense minigame, a perk system, a rage bar that you could fill up and each of your active skills had three different power-up versions that you could use from this rage resource, assuming of course you spent your skill points on them?
– I remember, that was hard to keep track of. And your point is?
– Well I’m thinking that we need to turn it up to 11. First of, we should double the size of skill tree for the player, triple Katarina’s, and give the player all the available perks in the world to choose from.
– Do it.
– Then, you recall we had that tower defense minigame that took like 20 minutes? We should make that a recurring thing. Every half an hour or so, players would get a radio message that they need to go back immediately to the base, there is a new tower defense game.
– Do it.
– Next, we are thinking how we had essences in the first game, these purple stuff that gave you very minimal additional bonuses to your items if you asked the essence applier NPC to apply them and it was very boring and pointless? What we should do is runes. Rune fragments. You collect them. In addition to the essence of course.
– What do runes do?
– Nobody knows. There will be a dwarf character so maybe something with that…? But I doubt many players would feel the urge to try it.
– Yes, do it.
– Two more active skills so you can now hotkey eight?
– Do it.
– A display in the resistance base where you can keep trophies giving the whole team bonuses?
– Do it.
– Scrolls? You collect them, they give you temporary bonuses?
– Do it.
– OK, this is going surprisingly well. All right, we are thinking at some point of the game you obtain a pokémon, keep it in your base, you can send it off to real-time missions, it gains levels, collects stuff for you, you give them bonuses like you would with a real pokémon: by inserting magic candles in its candle slots.
– Loving it, do it.
– We are also thinking there should be a whole side game with off-screen battles and secret espionage missions.
– I’m listening.
– You would have a certain number of soldiers, you could train them and give them better equipment. And there would also be some main NPC character captains with their own attributes and history and trophies that give them boosts. They would have like 15 different attributes, for example, melee expert, occult science, leader, scout, etc. You could send them on side-missions that come in in regular intervals, and based on the description of the mission you need to choose the right captain for the job. You could even opt to send them to the tower defense game! Oh, and it’s all real-time.
– Do it. Just to clarify, this would still be a 15-hours game?
– Yes, correct.
– OK, do it, do all! Anything else?
– Great! I think that’s actually it. Unless you have any other suggestions…
– As a matter of fact, I do. Remember in the first game, we had a couple of hidden references to pop culture and games and stuff? I’m thinking we could do that, but you know, all of them.
– All of them?
– Yes, all. All the references. Ever. Get them in the game. Any sci-fi / fantasy / horror / pulp fiction character in any movie / book / comic / series, all the historical figures, all the musicians, all the other games, Douglas Adams, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Ryan from saving private Ryan, doesn’t matter, get them in. There should be a cemetery for the fantasy version of the Forever 27. Throw in some Budapest landmarks, while we are at it.
– I think I know what you mean, sir. You got it. *wink*
The Good
Everything that was great about the first game is still there. The world building, artwork, music, the monsters, carefully designed maps (no procedurally generated monstrosities, thank god!)- all of this is top notch, unique, huge thumbs up. Can’t stress enough how well established the game world is, it really feels like a living universe.
One thing the game does even better than its predecessors is the real-time large scale battles. Right at the beginning, you drop in a huge battlezone, you see soldiers fortifying their positions, and your first task is to go to each choke point, and give commands to the soldiers there. You might want them to hold until the last man, call for reinforcement, slowly retreat, etc. There is not much to base your decisions on, we tried our best. And then the enemy attacks, you see the red dots swarming all over the green allied dots, you run up and down the map, help wherever the enemy broke through. There is a real sense of urgency in these missions, and I was loving them. It feels like that large battle scene in Diablo 3, just, you know, actually good and enjoyable.
I absolutely cherished the small scale of the story. No galactical demons beyond the wraps of time and space threatening the very existence of the universe. There is civil war, there are sorta good guys, you are helping them, and getting paid in the process.
The fact that you can continue with your character from the first game is something I have never seen before, works great. Although you have to be level 30 in order to import, and if you happened to miss a whole area worth of XP in the first game because of a bug, it will be a challenge leveling up, considering the utter lack of post-story content… but that’s the first game’s issue.
The challenge level is also great. This is really aimed at players who want to finish a game once, feel challenged, feel satisfied when it’s over, and that really describes me. Potions, kiting, re-talenting, searching for better gear – you have to pay attention to all of these, if you want to survive a long fight.
One other thing I found great is how well it works with two people. If you are of different classes, you can really complement each other’s play styles, and work together very effectively.
The game has a couple of cool smaller ideas, like how during the loading screens, you see two newspaper covers about the recent events, but they are both propaganda papers, one from General Harker’s side, the other from the resistance. Now you can play more than one class, although now that I’m writing it down, it’s more strange how you could not in the base game. Anyway, all three classes are available now in the base game, you don’t have to buy them in a separate DLCs. Also, there are actual cinematics in this one, so that’s good I guess, although somewhat expected in this day and age. Some cinematics show the game world as if it was a board game, with pieces and cards laid on the map showing the strength of the opposing forces. I felt intrigued, good job, game.
The Bad
The story is not terrible, but not as streamlined as the first game. In the first one, you got a letter asking you to go to a place, so you go to the place after finding your way around certain setbacks, then realize what the letter was all about, and do the thing that needs to be done. Here, there are huge wars everywhere I guess, and you go to places and fight. You usually know why you are there, but occasionally I got confused as to what we are trying to achieve. Instead of a nice, linear journey on a map towards your well-established goal, you are jumping all over the place. Especially confusing were the tower defense sections, which, remember, is a large part of the game. In the first game, you walked out of the secret base, and there was the section you had to tower defend. Here, you teleport to a platform in the middle of nothing.
There is a really stupid twist around the end, it reminded me of one of our discussions while we were watching the season 2 of Preacher, there is a Hitler character in that series (the actual Adolf Hitler, in hell), and he seems like a nice guy at first, but at some point, one of us asked if we think Hitler is in fact just faking it and he really is evil. And if that’s a spoiler for you, well, I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t ever played anything ever.
Also, epic as it was from a mechanical point of view, I did not like the final boss fight from a story perspective . One final boss that appeared there was literally unheard of before. And there is a small choice in the fight, and our choice unbeknownst to us led to a path where the final fight was… to avoid spoilers, something I did not find cathartic.
Now some small nitpicky ones.
- The fact that you can’t play a two-player game where one of you is Katarina is still a missed opportunity. Although with the different classes, I don’t mind it as much as with the vanilla base game.
- There are random side quests that don’t seem to lead anywhere. At some point, you find a frozen goldfish, then you can melt it out and you get a diamond earring and then nothing happens. Maybe that’s funny, I could not tell. Or there is a ring where you are supposed to do certain tasks while wearing that ring (go to the altar in a certain place, kill something, etc), and it went on for a couple of hours and then we did the final one and nothing happened. Seemed like a bug, but we could not be bothered by checking.
- The challenge level is usually OK, but gets a bit easy by the end. Or maybe we are just too good! It’s also a bit too cheap to re-talent or re-spawn, and the game is not punishing enough. (Yes, I do want my games to punish me, there is nothing wrong with that!)
- The game is not expensive, and I certainly got my money’s worth, still, advertising it as a separate game is a bit steep. The engine, the artwork, some monsters, they come directly from the first game.
- This might be an issue for some, the game is not popular, at all, and it’s quite difficult to find good sources if you are stuck anywhere.
I mentioned in the pitch meeting section how the game is suffocating in references. I don’t think they were so abundant in the first game or just I did not notice, but a really high portion of the humor now comes from straight-faced references. Let me give you an example. At some point early in the game, amidst the huge opening battle, you get a side quest (which, granted, you can reject), and your goal is to save a certain private called Brian. The side quest is called Saving Private Brian. And you go there, there is a private, wounded and his name is Brian. That’s it. Now imagine that happening at least once every five minutes. It gets tiring really quickly. Granted, there are funny ones too.
I also did not like most of the small additional stuff. Sending out troops to missions did literally nothing, and we spent at least an hour carefully selecting the right people for each scenario. The same is true for the pokémon training, trophy hunting (were we hunting those, or did they just appear?), runes, scrolls. You don’t need this many mechanisms in a game. You can’t just throw ideas at a player and ask them to use whichever they want. I am a completionist, if there is a side mission section with individual leader NPCs, you can be damn sure I will max that out, but ultimately I felt like we shouldn’t have bothered with it, they just drew us away from the really interesting and epic part of the game: the combat.
And finally, the big issue. The bugs. Oh, the bugs. In our one playthrough, there weren’t actually huge, game breaking ones, like in the first game, when we got stuck in a territory, or a boss just insta-died after we defeated one henchman, or when we arrived at a location we knew should be packed with monsters and it was completely empty and we just wandered through the huge deserted city with epic battle music booming in the background. It was nothing like that in this second game. But. The smaller bugs that did occur, they did occur frequently, and my annoyance level built up really fast. Spells are often invisible, so you don’t see if you are hitting anyone, characters are stuck, can’t shoot or move, you constantly have to teleport back home in the hopes that it will re-trigger the game to work. At one point, I got knocked down in a fight, and for some reason, could not stand up. But I did not die either. This happened in the middle of a tower defense minigame, so I could not teleport back home. The only thing I could do was dashing, which is a skill that has a 15 seconds cooldown. So with my character lying on the floor, I slooooowly dashed towards the monster entrance of the next wave in the hopes that I would die quickly and could re-spawn. It worked, by the way, but did leave a bad taste.
The Co-Op
Co-op is great. You have your standard ARPG stuff, so you find the best skill combos, you can tank / cc / snipe / do AoE damage, do different elemental damage, etc.
One thing that not many ARPGs do is that you can resurrect each other, which is a really nice co-op mechanism. Collecting sets is also quite important, so you need to work together when it comes to looting, paying attention to what item might be relevant to the other player.
There is also the section where you select your captains to be sent on off-screen missions, it was fun to argue which one would be best suited for the mission at hand.
The Recommendation
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II is a flawed masterpiece. It’s bursting with ideas, has the best game world I have ever seen in an ARPG, was obviously put together with huge enthusiasm, and yet the overly complicated mechanisms and the annoying bugs drag it down. I only recommend it for connoisseurs of finer games, players who are willing to suffer through bugs and lack of online guides in order to enjoy this diamond in the rough.
Info
| Release Year | 2015 |
| Genre | ARPG |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 15 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Great |
| Story | Good |
| Co-Operation | Good |