14 DAY TRIAL // Neocore Games' The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing certainly took many players by surprise. Its innocuous arrival was shadowed by much stronger contenders in the action role-playing game arena, but it managed to steal the hearts (and time) of many gamers.
Offering a mélange of innovation and stitching together popular mechanics from a ton of games, and delivering its story with tongue in cheek, the games showed less polish than triple A titles but much more heart. And steampunk, which is generally considered a sort of Get Out Of Jail Free Card in the gaming world.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing 2 saw a lot more press coverage and a lot more interest from gamers, promising to improve every aspect of the first game and add a ton of new features.
We got our twitchy mouse-wielding hands on the Van Helsing 2 beta, and proceeded to blast our way through endless hordes of grotesque man-machine hybrids and cleverly engineered automated contraptions.
The new classes have their own skill trees, and the guys at Neocore Games have certainly been busy, offering a greatly expanded arsenal. New tricks, new auras and a ton of new spells will ensure that players have a lot of variety when it comes to disposing of whatever has a red health bar.
The gameplay itself feels great, and using the new guys is exciting, especially since they come with so many new abilities. As is the mainstay in action role-playing games, you'll usually level a "main" spell and have a second one at the ready for area of effect or added pwnage, pretty much ignoring the rest.
It is not the case here, as although you'll still be focused on your bread and butter abilities, you will benefit greatly from the use of your complete arsenal, from crowd control designed to slow and bunch mobs together to high cooldown area of effect abilities that can put a significant dent in some distant enemies' life bars while you handle their more immediately menacing buddies.
You'll find yourself relying on secondary abilities a lot, because they usually tend to get you out of tight spots, like allowing you to freeze time for a couple of seconds or become completely invulnerable for a tiny period and other such utility effects.
The graphics have been considerably improved, and casting a charged thunder strike feels appropriately epic, what with all the ominous static electricity gathering and the screen shaking and everyone being knocked down when the lightning strikes.
The environments in the beta looked pretty good, they had a proper post industrial revolution on a mass scale feeling about them, with bombs falling in the background and artillery fire lighting the screen periodically, and the enemies had some clever designs about them.
The game looks great and plays great, all the animations have been improved by a considerable margin and hacking and slashing your way through the hordes of mechanically enhanced but not too bright enemies felt even more fun than in the original, which was pretty solid to begin with.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing 2 is expected to come out on April 17, and pre-orders are already live, affording instant access to the game's beta upon purchase.
