Much like The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, Victor Vran joins a steadily increasing group of great Diablo-like titles now available on Xbox One. It’s a game which perfectly encapsulates the grindy dungeon-crawling aspect of Blizzard’s masterpiece and, although it feels a lot more focused than many other ARPGs, it suffers from a lack of variety which may cause many to lose interest in the long run.
Unlike Diablo, Victor Vran does away with the traditional class system, a system which is usually extremely important in ARPGs. Instead, the game limits you to skills provided by weapons and acquirable demon powers which you’ll gain either through the game’s generous loot drops or through merchants. While each weapon feels unique and can cater to very different playstyles, there aren’t many different types of weapons dotted throughout to accommodate the game’s size. With only two skills per weapon, combat can go from being exhilarating to tedious within a matter of hours.
The game does attempt to alleviate some of the repetition by adding ultimate abilities in the form of the aforementioned demon powers. As you kill enemies, you gain Overdrive which slowly fills up allowing you to unleash one of two equippable abilities tied to the left and right triggers. Over the course of your adventure, you’ll gain many forms of demon powers (some more effective than others) and they’re crucial to getting you out of sticky situations, especially in later parts of the game.
As you progress through the world, you may notice that weapon drops do start to quickly become underpowered for their job. This is where the game’s transmutation system comes into play; allowing you to combine weapons, outfits, demon powers and destiny cards (which also provide you with buffs) together in order to create powerful items with unique attributes quickly becomes essential as you tackle bigger hordes of enemies with higher damage outputs. The process is initially very finicky thanks to an incredibly clunky UI, but is rewarding and gives you something else to do with you bags of loot other than sell them to a merchant.
Unlike Diablo or Torchlight, Victor Vran spouts a very focused design which can be seen as both a strength and a burden. The game’s many towns and dungeons are designed well and feature a significant amount of replay value as every location has five side objectives for you to complete, but the designs repeat themselves all too much and many locations—especially towns—feel very similar to each other. It’s a problem which sneaks in way too often as you grow accustomed to the world of Victor Vran and while they may have a unique enemy or two, they don’t do anything to feel memorable at all.
This could have been helped by an interesting plot but Victor Vran’s narrative is underwhelming at the best of times. The initial story of Vran attempting to find the Well of the World and save the city of Zagoravia is not only a clichéd affair, but a relatively boring one. It utilizes a lot of tired tropes and attempts to make jest of the same situations it’s thrusting you into. Telling you that what you’re doing is repetitive and monotonous doesn’t help the fact that it is still repetitive and monotonous. On top of this, the writing isn’t necessarily very strong either. It does a passable job but characters feel flat, dialogue is incredibly stale, jokes are cringeworthy throughout and the only voice actor who is genuinely good is Doug Cockle as Victor.
For those who enjoy the type of gameplay that Victor Vran offers, there is a staggering amount of content on offer. The game includes all of the PC versions content, which adds tonnes of new dungeons, side missions, etc., and for those with the Overkill Edition, there’s two sizable expansions thrown into the mix as well. Every bit of content is also available to play in online or local co-op which makes everything a lot more fun than on your lonesome. With a friend, Victor Vran is an entertaining venture although the problems the game exhibits aren’t very much helped with the assistance of a mate, you just speed through them quicker than you could alone.
In a game such as this, bugs are usually a common occurrence but outside of a few weird crashes I got during early hours of the game, which I haven’t encountered since, the game is relatively stable. Its crisp 1080p visuals can look gorgeous, especially at 60 FPS, but when the action gets heavy the game starts to exhibit mild screen tearing across the sides. It’s not particularly offensive and only a mild sense of wobbling occurs, but it’s an aspect which could potentially turn some people off.
Summary
Victor Vran is full to the brim with ARPG content. While its narrative is light and its gameplay is limited, the well-designed levels and high replayability make this a worthwhile purchase for fans of the genre, and those who are just looking for a fun time with friends.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.