Back in my post about Portal, I mentioned that I’d only get a game if I thought I could enjoy it despite the negative reviews, but what I ended up learning the hard way was that certain genres and sub-genres just aren’t expected to do certain things well, and as a result, those weaknesses don’t get mentioned in said reviews. For example, when I looked at the negative reviews for Tales of Zestiria back in January 2017 and only saw people complaining about the story, I thought “Well, if the story is the only thing people are complaining about, surely the game-play must be good!” Nope: if you’ve played any Tales game, you’ll know that combat is far from being skill-based, instead being fraught with asynchronous and unavoidable attacks, effectively combining turn-based JRPG combat and real-time hack-‘n’-slash combat in such a way as to get the benefits of neither and the downsides of both. So, really, the story was all the game had left to hook players. This game was a similar case: I saw the negative reviews talking about how there were only a few different types of enemies, and I thought “Maybe the game uses level design to force players to rethink their approach without the game having to introduce anything new.”

And now that I’ve given you a good laugh, time for the review:

• The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut
  

  21 hours playtime

  23 of 50 achievements

This is a CRPG. You move with the left stick, attack/talk/examine with the left trigger, and as you learn abilities, you can equip them to the face buttons and the right shoulder buttons (and in typical CRPG fashion, they all have their own cool-downs). Health and mana also regenerate over time, for both you and enemies. At the beginning of the game, you can choose one of six classes, but you don’t get to see their skill trees ahead of time; you only get a vague description of what they can do that reads more like backstory or lore than a play-style description. I chose the elementalist because I thought it would have the greatest chance of having a healing ability (it doesn’t).

Oh, and of course you’re forced to a standstill while your attack animation plays out.

As you might be able to guess, level design only ever consists of “can walk on” and “can’t walk on,” so the only way enemies are guaranteed to be a threat is if they beeline themselves and their attacks towards the player, and the only way that can be a challenge is if the enemies are in huge groups–but wait, that might make the game impossible, so the player is also given an AI ally who both attacks enemies with you and can draw their attacks from you (also, on death, the ally comes back to life after a cool-down). The weird thing is that there actually is a bit of thought put into some of the enemies; it just gets ruined by how the other enemies are designed. For example, some enemy projectiles move slow enough that you actually have a chance to dodge them (despite your attack animation pausing your movement), but other enemies have guns that instantly draw a line from them to you, dealing damage with no way for you to dodge it. Another example: some enemies have an animation that telegraphs their melee attacks, while other enemies have melee attacks that are guaranteed to hit you as soon as the animation starts (and they also outpace you, so you can’t just run away). Since there’s no way to dodge most attacks and since battles only ever consist of enemy swarms with no variation in level design or AI, this means that every battle just devolves into mindlessly tapping the attack button until one side dies and maybe moving away a bit if some of the enemies manage to target you (which, as you can imagine, gets pretty repetitive after 20 hours). Also, since you can’t use two attacks at once due to how the cool-downs work, you’ll want to prioritize autonomous abilities (like ones that summon an ally or spawn an element column that chases the nearest enemy).

Bosses aren’t exempt from that, either. Really, the only thing separating most boss fights from the common enemy swarms is the framing; they even go down just as easily with the exact same strategy. The only boss fight that ever gave me trouble was the second one, which consisted of four equally-powerful enemies (one of which had a cannon that I’m pretty sure can’t be dodged, either). I did die here a few times, but if you die on a boss, you can select “respawn at checkpoint” for free, and this doesn’t reset the bosses’ HP, so you can still win through attrition.

I did also have trouble in one part where an earlier boss was reused as a normal enemy, and I let it get caught on a bridge. However, while it was stuck there, it kept spamming guided bullets (and these move ever so slightly faster than you can), which meant I was forced to take hits before I could get close enough to attack, much less get around it to be at a better vantage point. Needless to say, I also got killed here a couple times. Thing is, if you die against normal enemies, only “respawn at base” is free, but even this doesn’t cause previously-killed enemies to respawn, so your punishment for death is retracing your steps across an empty field (which, as you can imagine, also gets pretty repetitive).

By the way, there’s no obvious feedback if you get hurt; the screen will only turn red if you’re at less than 1/4 HP, but by then, it’s usually too late to do anything.

The closest the game gets to having variety are the optional tower defense missions: it’s still the same enemies as before, but now they move on set paths from various starting points, and you have to kill them before they reach the other side of the map. To help you do this, you’re given a set amount of “parts” which you spend to build and upgrade traps wherever you yourself won’t be able to defend as easily. This mode also has its problems, though: on top of most tower defense missions playing out similarly to each other (meaning no continued difficulty curve between missions), the missions themselves have a bell curve for difficulty: the first two waves only have enemies come from one or two spots, but the last few waves won’t be much trouble, either, since you get more parts each wave. The third wave is always the one that will give you the most trouble since you have to deal with three spawn points, but only two of those will be connected, so you have to rely more on the traps you’ve built with your limited resources to cover spots you won’t be able to reach easily.

Overall, I think it’s better than the Tales games, but I still don’t think I’d recommend it. With no level design, no AI variety, and very few enemy attacks, the game is just repetitive and boring, barely even giving feedback for those times you do get killed.

P.S. The graphics also aren’t that great. Reeds count as walls, but the grass that looks nearly identical to them can be walked on. EDIT: There’s even a part where you have to go downhill north, and the slope is at just the right angle so that all the enemies are overlapping each other, making it that much more difficult to dodge what few attacks can actually be avoided.