The second installment of the Van Helsing series centers around you destroying the evil technology-driven masters bent on taking over the city of Borgova. You’re joined by the witty Katarina, who’s foul mouth keeps you entertained as you go along, probably saying what we’ve all been thinking anyway. She adds an additional layer of comedy, something you rarely see in games like this. The story builds on the previous installment, expanding the world even further for the player, introducing you to interesting and exotic locations all over the region.
When you first start the game, you’d be forgiven if you cringed at the excessively bad voice acting. The game however starts off quite easy, giving you small amounts of supernatural beings to kill off before continuing the story. It systematically scales up the difficulty—regardless of your difficulty setting—and you’re soon fighting hoards of creatures that is quite honestly a challenge to conquer. Once you hit the Crystal Laboratory, you feel like the game you’re playing at normal difficulty suddenly turned into Nightmare Mode in Doom. The story however is quite unimaginative, and the writing does seem like it was rushed in some places.
Once you’re in the City of Borgova, you’re set against the mad Scientists, who are on a conquest to take the city and infiltrate the Foundry. They want to take over so that they can make more of the Steamworks-inspired war machines that are flooding the city. You’re seemingly the only person who can stop it. As someone who didn’t play the first installment, I jumped in blind to the backstory of the game, but ended up quite enthralled in the world. Even with the ever-increasing difficulty, I found the world engaging. However, unlike other games in the supernatural genre, there wasn’t a lot to do outside the main objective. Yes, there are a few missions scattered around, but they don’t offer you much when you do finish the game. The game also has the tendency to relegate the ‘awesome’ moments to the loading screens–of which there are plenty–so you can read about things you weren’t a part of but merely influenced.
One thing I also had some issues with is–unlike its competition–the upgrades system. Upgrades didn’t give you the sensation of being more powerful as you rank up. Also, while you’re ‘upgrading’, the creatures scale up as well, making them near impossible to kill. The difficulty of the game has to be adjusted because even at its easiest it’s insane.
The upgrade system is incredibly clunky and unintuitive. Besides the fact that you aren’t visually notified when you do upgrade except for a small notification in the bottom part of the interface, it unnecessarily bogs you down with the responsibility of managing two characters instead of just relegating Katarina to an automatic system. Why don’t I have that option so she’s optimized for her skills, instead of you randomly upgrading items that seem to not make a difference? The special abilities are fueled by Rage points, and you would be forgiven to never actually use this feature. I tried a few times to use these special abilities, only to be left with rather muted effects. I would have preferred these abilities to be easier to access, other than the d-pad, where very few people actually think to look.
Loot is another thing in this game relegated to the ‘I do not care’ pile of features. It gives you several chests and barrels—most of them empty—with loot items that end up all being the same thing, and filling up your inventory. The issue here is that even with these items equipped, you rarely see a marked improvement over the previous item, other than it giving you the illusion of an upgrade, or that is how it felt to me.
Besides the lackluster upgrade and loot system, the gameplay was quite fun. It gives you clear objectives and doesn’t try to muddy the waters too much, like some other RPG titles like to do. The world is open to an extent, and gives you ample areas to explore. However, the game does try to double down Diablo-style by swarming the player with near constant attacks, and it does become tiring after defeating thirteen groups of the same enemies in fifteen minutes, in an area no larger than your backyard.
The graphics in the game are what one would regard as acceptable for a game of this caliber, and I only had an issue with the ‘Light Cloaks’ that gave the human player a weird un-textured look while standing still. Sound is good, however the enemies do sound odd when there are a bunch of them trying to take you down, in some cases emulating strange renditions of Diablo on sites of ill repute.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II is fun in its own right, but there are too many things that take away from the experience. Wildly inconsistent difficulty spikes being one of them. I did find the gameplay quite enjoyable, but the story left me unsatisfied.
Summary
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing II is a decent RPG-adventure game, filled with some awesome concepts and some of the best gameplay elements I’ve experienced yet. However, the unsatisfying loot and upgrade system paired with a story that was merely adequate, tells me it could have been better. But to be fair, everything can be better. The game could use some more polish overall.
In my opinion, this game is worthy of a purchase for both fans of the series and newcomers to it like myself. If you find Dark Souls your bread and butter, and you’ve been looking for a top-down experience similar to that, give this game a go. If you find yourself easily enraged by games where the difficulty is wildly unbalanced, give this one a skip.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.