The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III Review

The final installment in the trilogy of games that have followed the incredible adventures of “Halbarad” Van Helsing has finally arrived. Having played the previous two, I was interested to see how the trilogy would finally unfold, though I would be lying if I said I was completely happy with the result.
Neocore, the developers, have been incredibly shrewd in the development of their Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing franchise. Knowing the market and their own limitations, splitting what I assume was likely meant to be a single game at a premium release price (£30/$40) into three separate entries, each subsequently released on the 22nd of May 2013, 2014 and 2015 at the price of £12/$15/€15, has proven to be a successful move to say the least; I imagine a lot of people who would have otherwise passed on a full priced title took the plunge, since that’s how I entered the series as well.

The Van Helsing games remind me very much of episodic games along the lines of the Half-Life 2 Episodes, only Neocore actually know how to release the games at a decent rate. Of course what makes this possible is that there is very little that changes between the games, the re-use of assets becomes noticeable and there is very little, other than story, to differentiate this from the previous entry.
Indeed, with The Incredible Adventure of Van Helsing III you are practically expected to be familiar with the franchise by now. A reasonable expectation I would argue, coming into the third and final entry of a trilogy without being familiar with the previous seems to be a strange thing to say the least. As a result of this expectation, you are thrown right into the game with little other than a firm slap on the bum and an inspiring “go get ’em, tiger” in the form of quick and easy tutorials. Not sure how to do something after this? You’ll have to go into the menu and have a little read.
Everything runs with the theme that you should be familiar with the previous games. Back are the tower defense side quests. Back is the army management system, only you don’t really have anybody to fight. Back is the Chimera. To be quite fair, everything that expands the game and gives it something to do on the side is a direct result of the second game. The only things that have changed are the side quests, some of which refer to the previous titles and of course there is the token Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference.
What is strangely missing is the ability to import your previous character. In one way, it makes some sense in that the number of classes has increased from three to six and the level cap has decreased from sixty to thirty, something that I consider the strangest change, though maybe apt due to the relative brevity of the campaign.

For those uninitiated with Neocore’s Van Helsing franchise, it is a series of Action Role Playing Games (ARPG’s) very similar to Diablo 3, only with more freedom, a large number of side quests and possibly one of the few genuinely funny games to be found. A lot of the comedy can fall flat due to it being simply referential, but a lot of what works is due to the anarchic sense of humour of [insert first name here] Van Helsing’s associate and hunting partner, Lady Katarina. She’s dead you see, and she’ll tell you that a lot, but make it quite funny.
Not only can the dialogue between Van Helsing and Katarina be comedic, it can also be quite touching. By now they have been on quite a few adventures around Borgova, having rescued it twice before so they’re ever more comfortable around each other. This development across the three games is very well highlighted and moreso in this chapter, where more of Katarina’s history is revealed, from her time alive to how she died.
Alongside the humour on offer is the genuinely tight and well refined gameplay, even moreso than the previous entry. The Incredible Adventure of Van Helsing III will demand a lot of clicking to kill, picking up a lot of dropped loot and using a variety of skills to assist in the killing of hundreds of creatures.
Early on I made a comment about the re-use of assets. I do genuinely believe that this is the case, but it shouldn’t be taken as a slight against the game or Neocore because there is such an abundance of different creatures and locals that it still works and it’s brilliant to look at. What possibly leaves me feeling a little low is that I remember trudging through graveyard style levels in the previous games and the one here, until the end when a side-area opened up, felt like it was the same thing over again and padded with hordes of cookie-cutter zombies.

As much has remained good with the series, there seems to be a number of steps backward or even just to stand still. Nothing new has been added in terms of minigames, the tower defense game even seems to have been reduced as the number of times it pops up is meagre compared to the previous entry. I don’t want to sound too cynical, but I take that as a result of it being made into a standalone game in Deathtrap.
There’s also the fact that the level cap has been reduced, which has lowered the adaptability in character development. What has most likely influenced this is the splitting of the three original classes into six, meaning there is no real way of swapping between two styles of combat, limiting you to just the one and leaving another style for a second playthrough, if you decide to do so.
A further step back has been made in technical issues cropping up all too frequently, starting from items in the inventory duplicating themselves, which could either be fixed by a number of repeated moving from one characters inventory to the others or it would just hog up a section of your limited bag space. Sometimes during this attempted fix the game simply decided to crash. Possibly the worst of the bugs I encountered was when I simply fell through the floor on one of the levels, or at least I appeared to, but I was still able to move as if I was actually there and I had to navigate by the art of randomly clicking everywhere on the screen until I appeared on land yet again.

Honestly, it’s difficult to say much about The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III. It’s far from a bad game, in fact it’s genuinely enjoyable at times. However, it’s taken a decent stride back from the previous entry. Where the first was a fresh look into this new world, the second improved on everything by keeping the world and expanding in both story and gameplay. The third seems to have run out of ideas and has just turned up to the party to finish off the story.
Do I like it? Well, yes, I do - I’m quite attached to the characters now, but I can’t help but notice how it’s stagnated. I’m happy to have seen the end of the stories of Van Helsing and Katarina, they are two of the better written characters of the past few years simply due to them feeling in place in the world, and a genuinely enjoyable world it has been to explore. I’m also happy to have seen the end of The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, if only for it to rest until something fresh and forward thinking can be done with it.