Victor Vran (2015)

Victor Vran, for xbox one

Rating: 8.0/10; Great

Played 2021. Did not play any DLC

Highly recommended for any fan of action rpgs, and even fans of pure action, such as twin stick shooters or Ninja Gaiden/Devil May Cry.

Victor Vran is a top down action rpg with more emphasis on tight action combat than rpg mechanics. It takes place in a gothic steampunk setting that seems ripped straight from Van Helsing and could even be the same world. The enemies are more generic though, missing the more unique and outlandish designs. What the game may lack in original art design is more than made up for by the gameplay. Despite sharing many similarities with the hack and slash Diablo clone genre, the game leans far more towards pure action. Dodge rolling around is important for avoiding damage while the single most important mechanic is weapon combat. There are several different weapons that each come with 3 moves bound to one of the face buttons; a spamable normal attack and 2 specials with cooldowns. Each weapon plays entirely differently with nuanced synergy between the 3 moves that takes practice and trips to the handy in game menus that describe each move as you find new weapons. Learning to use each weapon is about the same as learning a new class in other RPGs, and has a lot in common with the weapon combat in Guild Wars 2. You soon get a 2nd weapon slot so the depth of combat is considerable as you weave between the 2 weapons looking for synergies and balancing cooldowns. On top of this you can pause the game at any time to access the inventory and switch equipment around; not just weapons, but also consumables (like healing potions), demon powers (function like magic spells that use a rage style mechanic that goes up with battle and decays outside combat), and cards (passive boosts). Each of the 2 consumables and powers are bound to a button, giving every button on the controller a specific function, thus making excellent use of the controller. There is no manual target lock, rather you control the character's facing and the game decides what is targeted; generally the closest target in that direction. This works quite well and is not the handicap that I found it to be in the Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. A large reason why is because there a fewer but more threatening enemies.

After a short tutorial level you are introduced to the base, where you can buy/sell, upgrade and store stuff. Though I never found a need to use the storage because the inventory is extremely generous. The rest of the game is divided into larger hub stages and smaller dungeons, which you have to unlock by reaching the entrance in the hub. Both are populated with enemies and have challenges, secrets and loot to find. Each stage has 5 stars that correspond to completing 5 challenges, which will reward minor things like gold, xp and items. These challenges include finding secrets, using specific weapons or abilities, time limits and restrictions on getting hurt or using consumables and the like. After beating the story you unlock another set of 5 challenges for each stage, which are obnoxiously specific; like kill X of this type of enemy using the shotgun without taking damage. Some challenges cannot reasonably be completed at the same time, so there is a fair amount of replayability if you want to complete each challenge and find every secret. They are completely optional so you can just do the story and grind for loot and xp if you prefer. There are 5 separate difficultly modifications that can be turned on and off when playing on Normal. On Hard these are always on and cannot be turned off, but you can lower the difficulty to Normal. Of these mods, I absolutely hate the one that deals damage to you every several seconds. It forces you to rush and have a constant source of healing; either spending gold on potions or using cards and weapons that heal. It is enough to make me not recommend playing on Hard. The enemy design is excellent with every creature having traits and abilities that you need to keep in mind during combat. From spiders that explode for massive damage to anything nearby, to skeletons that get back up if you don't kill them with sudden massive damage, to difficult to avoid moves, to telegraphed don't stand in the glowy area attacks. And epic boss fights. On top of this, some enemies can randomly be champions and will use the same demon powers that you can. They can drop their power for you and I absolutely love how the game teaches you about the powers by having enemies use them against you. There were a few times where the difficulty spiked massively and a few things that feel unfair. The pull power can very easily get you killed because it draws you to the enemy "get over here" style, and then stuns for a few seconds. Though you can use powers and consumables while stunned, the sheer amount of damage you can take leads to a very high probability of death. The vampire thrall enemy goes into a berserker rage at half health that massively boosts its attack and movement speed such that they become difficult if not impossible to defeat without dying, especially if they are champions. Even worse the rage never wears off, so if you die or flee you will now be faced with the terrifying prospect of fighting a full hp raging thrall. This enemy is far too powerful and that rage needs to be nerfed with a short duration or something. Another somewhat overpowered enemy is the homing shot vampires, whose shots are very difficult to avoid. I had serious trouble with groups of those champions. There is almost no penalty for death though, just respawn at the entrance. Dying in a boss fight or the 2 end game extreme difficulty bonus areas forces you to restart the fight/entire area. It makes most of the game rather chill, unless you are going for challenges that dying would break, while the boss fights are nail bitingly intense.

Gaining xp leads to level ups that give fairly minor bonuses; mostly health and card points. These bonuses do little to increase the power of the character, and instead you must invest into the card, equipment and upgrade systems. You can equip up to 5 cards, the more powerful of which take up more card capacity points. They give powerful passive buffs, such as damage, healing, speed, or on crit explosions, for example. There are even unique cards that greatly improve a weapon type. Both cards and weapons come in color coded rarity though there is not a huge difference between the stats; think more like the original Diablo rather than Diablo 2. There is a limit to how powerful each thing can be, and an extensive upgrade system to max out just about everything. There is a general trend of higher levels and more difficult enemies dropping items that are closer to max stats. All of the upgrade recipes are handily described in the menu, but many require very specific and rare drops such that it would take ages to max things out. Cards are the simplest in that you combine 3 cards of the same type and color to get 1 card of the next tier up. There are also divine and wicked bonus stats on the cards that can be further upgraded for minor improvements. Weapons can be upgraded in color in a similar way but the weapon type produced is random. I did not bother to use that recipe. However, raw damage is easily upgraded by sacrificing weapons of the same color. A bonus effect can be added to a weapon by using a rune stone, but the menu implies demon powers can be used to add the effects. Rather, weapon prefixes and suffixes can be improved with specific combinations of 3 demon powers, which is very annoying because the only way to get powers is from random drops. Even more annoying, powers cannot be upgraded in color so I found my inventory piling up with nearly useless low tier demon powers. Would be nice if you could upgrade or convert them into powers that you can actually use for recipes. Overall, I found the upgrade system to be far too complex with too many things to keep track of. I'd rather just sell everything for gold and directly use gold to power up my stuff. The inventory and upgrade UI are a bit awkward because of the way item stats overlay on the screen. This is particularly annoying in the card screen, because the overlay for card stats blocks half of the card screen instead of the character page, which itself takes up half the screen. So you only get to use 25% of the screen to browse your cards; a truly obnoxious oversight.

The story is nothing to write home about, told through still images and fully voiced dialogue. It has the same kind of tongue in cheek humor as the Van Helsing games, especially the narrator/voice in Vran's head. It is enough to move the action ahead and be mildly entertaining, but the focus of this game is clearly the mechanics and gameplay; very enjoyable skill based action combat with a sprinkling of loot upgrading. Though you may not wish to grind out the best possible gear and complete all challenges, the base experience of mastering each weapon and enemy to come up with your own style is extremely satisfying.

Beat on Hard. The game said it was not recommended to play your first character on Hard, but I thought how bad could it be? I learned the basics of sword and shotgun in the tutorial and set off into the first zone using the shotgun as my main weapon. It was very rough going, as the spider nests were infinite spawning spiders, including champions. I managed to figure out what was going on without dying, but the shotgun was not putting out enough damage to kill the nests. I used a hammer for my 2nd weapon, which could wreck the nests but was risky to use on enemies. I hated the hex of pain, which periodically does hp damage. Damn I am going to need a lot more healing potions; fighting enemies at range was pretty good for avoiding damage but that hex damage really adds up. Luckily I found the perfect weapon from the chess mini boss; spider slayer’s shotgun of the vulture, which did hp restore on crits. And the shotgun is all about crits. I had no problems staying alive after that, though I made sure to stock up on healing potions when I next got to town.

I used diamond skin and sanguine aura for my powers, and methodically cleared each zone. I did the secrets and challenges that I could, but did not worry about the ones that I did not manage. Occasionally I would do an area over again to complete a challenge that was relatively easy. I did not do well with challenges involving time limits and not taking damage. I also did not even try to kill things with demons powers; nope I am using defensive ones. I did kind of like the challenges about killing enemies with specific weapons as a way to learn how to use other weapons. Just before the first boss I found a rapier and liked that better than the hammer. I used it to kill the boss and suffered my very first death in that fight. It was a tough fight, but once I realized he was not regenerating like all the other enemies, it was not quite so bad. I set up my cards with runner, ice explosion on crit and hp restore on kill. Later I put in some lifesteal. As the game progressed I found new types of weapons but did not really try them out. I did eventually replace that shotgun with a more damaging one as I had alternate means of healing, until I found a sweet lighting gun. Oh wow this type of gun is so much better than the shotgun. Then I found my first legendary, the dervish scythe, with an amazing whirlwind attack. Then I found the legendary cards for the lighting gun and scythe and put those in my build. I chose the vigilante armor early on and later found the zealot armor with its excellent defense, and ended off with the vanguard armor for an excellent mix of defense, armor penetration and turning off overdrive decay, which fit much better with my defensive demon powers.

I had a little trouble with the major spider boss because of the adds using pull on me. The pull demon power was one of the largest causes of death for me, due to being pulled right into melee range and stunned. I beat that boss by going around killing all the adds while ignoring the boss. The next major problem came from the vampire enemies, specifically the thrall hulks that enrage at half health. They are so ridiculously overpowered, moving faster than the player and doing massive melee damage while enraged. And the rage never wears off, even if they reset and regen back to full hp. A full hp champion thrall hulk that is enraged is by far the most dangerous thing in the game. One was a boss at the end of the gauntlet dungeon and the only way I was even able to beat him was because he did not heal between my deaths, and it took a lot of deaths to beat him. The normal ones could be killed fairly easily by using the dervish whirlwind attack, while champions needed healing potion and ambrosia for 2 heals and resetting the cooldown on whirlwind. At very late game I started using time bubble as my second demon power, and that works amazing on the hulks by slowing them to a manageable speed for kiting. I should have been using that all along. Then came the major boss Apocalypse, which wrecked me so hard I had to look up online how to beat him. The problem was near the end when he spawns 4 adds at the same time; there was just too much damage and it was too difficult to shake them to do much damage. Reading online was how I learned the second consumable slot could be used by pressing right. Oh! Well that should be enough help to beat the fight. Not long before I had found the ghostbuster legendary lighting gun. It sucks because the regular attack pulls enemies right to you, which is NOT what I want. But the charge up area attack pulls enemies into it. I beat those 4 adds by equipping the ghostbuster and my main lighting gun, only using the ghostbuster to use the area ability. I did not even need to use the other consumable slot because that sucking effect kept the adds off my back enough. The most difficult fight in the game was the well of worlds where there was a ridiculous amount of enemies, some of which used pull. I died so many times trying to beat that and it took only using the area pull of the ghostbuster while kiting around in circles. I literally could not afford to do anything else, and then I dove into the portal when I could. The end game had some intense fights but I beat the final boss first try without dying. By then I swapped the scythe out for a sword and used the epic sword card for the heal on crit; it could heal most of my hp with a single crit! I also used the stun on annoying enemies before switching back to lighting gun. I hated those damn vampires with purple homing shots. I tried the cauldron of chaos a couple times but did not beat it. Same with the bottomless pit. It really annoyed me how you have to start over upon death, as staying alive on Hard is a massive challenge, especially when you have to deal with large numbers of enemies that can have devastating combo abilities. I don’t see the point of continuing to play, completing the challenges that I missed, doing the epic challenges (which are ridiculously specific) or maxing out my stuff. But despite that the gameplay is fundamentally enjoyable so I could see playing it again sometime.

Shotgun: The normal attack inflicts vulnerability if you time the button presses correctly, while the second ability resets when an enemy is killed, so the optimal way is to finish enemies off with the second ability for big damage while they are vulnerable. The third shot knocks enemies back, hits an area and gives a speed buff, and is useful to creating distance and shooting faster. Overall I find the shotgun a pretty good weapon, but having to keep track of the timing on the regular attack is annoying. Never had the epic card so have no idea how good it would be.

Sword: The normal attack inflicts vulnerability on the third hit, while the second ability resets on crit, and the third hit stuns but stuns a group on crit. I liked opening with the stun and then doing a rotation of 3 regular hits followed by the second so it would never be on cooldown. But this creates a kind of timing situation like the shotgun and I found it easy to mess up. It seemed like sometimes the vulnerability happened on a second hit, throwing off the rotation, so I felt I needed to hesitate after each strike to see if there was vulnerability. If not for the sweet heal on crit from the epic card, the sword would not be such a great weapon. Rapier: The normal attack is a chain of 3 that buffs your next attack after the third hit. The second ability is a charge that runs through enemies, while the third is a big hit with a bit of a windup that does bleeding damage over time and resets the cooldown on charge if it kills an enemy. I found the rapier to be great at focusing damage on single tough enemies but it does not really do anything to help you stay alive. I did not use it during the mid to late game and did not find the epic card.

Hammer: The normal attack is slow and powerful, hitting a small area. The second ability has a charge up for big damage and cripples, meaning it can pair well with a ranged weapon. The third also has a bit of a charge up and grants lifesteal, not just for the hammer but for any weapon. I never took advantage of the cripple and lifesteal while I used the hammer and never found the epic card.

Lightning gun: The normal attack is a continuous beam that increases in damage the longer you hold it, meaning it is not the best for hit and run. It electrocutes enemies, which allows chain lighting attacks and attracts the balls from the second attack. The balls are kind of like minions but take a couple seconds to cast. Since they home in on electrocuted enemies, they allow hit and run to work very effectively. Touching them hurts you though and they will home in on you if you become electrocuted, like from fighting lighting elementals. The third ability fires a ball that does area damage, with the range depending on bit on how long you charge it up. If you can manage to get enemies into it the damage output is amazing when combined with the other 2 abilities, but more often that not I found it to miss and thus did not use it all that much. This gun is much more fun than the shotgun and almost has a minion master playstyle. You don’t have to fool around with the shotgun’s timing and watching for vulnerability, instead having to watch the ball cooldown so you can keep using them and trying not to get hit by them. The epic card improves damage, makes balls stay longer and reduces their cooldown, making for a very effective weapon.

Scythe: The normal attack hits a bit of an area and stacks up a resource called soul shards that power up the other 2 abilities. The second does an area stun while the third does a controllable whirlwind that reduces incoming damage while doing nice area damage. Timing the normal attack properly can inflict vulnerability, but I never worried about that, I just kept the button pressed. I think this weapon is better than the sword and more suited to multiple enemies. The epic card makes the stun do damage and makes both abilities refund soul shards, so there is less need to use the normal attack.

Hand mortar: The normal attack fires a grenade at a distance depending on how long you charge it up. This is not a style of shooting that I enjoy and it would take quite a bit of practice to work out how to shoot this accurately. The second makes a damage over time pool that cripples, but suffers from the same style of range finding. The third does a point blank knockback. I barely used this weapon and found the style of aiming to be far too cumbersome.

Tome: The normal attack generates orbs that can be picked up to remove the cooldowns on the other 2 abilities. The second moves you across the screen while stunning multiple enemies, while the third sucks enemies in for an explosion. Kind of like the ghostbuster, but immediate and less range. I never used this weapon until after beating the game, just to see how it worked. The normal attacks sucks due to lack of range and difficulty aiming, but the other 2 are great abilities while kiting. I think the ghostbuster + tome is the best setup for dealing with large groups of enemies that do not give you a chance to properly attack. I was doing the cauldron of chaos with that set up, only using the 2 suck in area attacks while kiting in circles.

My gear:

Devastating lighting gun of the duelist: gold, 129-174 damage, 107 armor penetration, 12% crit, +50% crit damage. +26% damage, +57 armor penetration, +30% damage cursed. My main weapon which I upgraded as much as possible and transmuted the cursed damage boost. I never found enough berserk powers to max out the regular damage boost.

Devastating sword of the duelist: gold, 57-106 damage, 49 armor penetration, 10% crit, +100% crit damage. +19% damage, +49 armor penetration, 42 hp on hit. My secondary weapon that got me through the end game. Not quite maxed out but fairly upgraded.

Dervish: purple, 20-200 damage, 25 armor penetration, 10% crit, +150% crit damage. +17% damage, 40% chance to inflict vulnerability. Amazing damage on that whirlwind. For some tricky fights I have to swap out the sword to use this.

The ghostbuster: purple, 100-135 damage, 50 armor penetration, 10% crit, +50% crit damage. +17% damage, overdrive fills 125% faster.

Cursed tome of the bear: gold, 31-51 damage, 8% crit, +100% crit damage. +31% damage cursed, crits knockback. The tome I tried out at the end. Not upgraded.

Devastating shotgun of the duelist: gold, 56-113 damage, 51 armor penetration, 7% crit, +150% crit damage. +21% damage, +51 armor penetration, cooldowns reduced by 2.3 seconds on overkill. Upgraded a little bit and I even transmuted a third effect. Not as good as the lightning gun though.

Cursed hammer of vampirism: gold, 157-210 damage, 11% crit, +100% crit damage. +26% damage cursed, 55 hp on hit. I don’t use hammer anymore but I like how this one has lifesteal to go with its lifesteal ability.

Devastating rapier of the duelist: gold, 62-93 damage, 130 armor penetration, 7% crit, +150% crit damage. +22% damage, +30 armor penetration. Not really upgraded or used.

I have 3 or 4 different legendary hand mortars, which I don’t want to use.

Vanguard’s outfit: 62 armor, 40 armor penetration, +2000 max overdrive, overdrive does not decay outside combat, -30% overdrive gain Diamond demon power: purple, absorbs 1380 damage, 10% reflection

Time bubble demon power: purple, 50% slow for 11.8 seconds over 8.05 meters

I also have a bunch of other purple powers, but I don’t like the damage dealing ones. Sanguine aura can occasionally be useful when low on health.

The divine runner card: +20% movement speed, 42% negate crits

The wicked archer card: +20% ranged damage, +20% crit chance for 10 seconds on overkill

The wicked archer card: +20% ranged damage, +1.7% overdrive on overkill

Legendary sword and lightning gun cards

I have a number of other good cards that I could swap out to maximize my combat effectiveness but don’t bother. Gold hope for large boost to hp, gold alchemist for potion cooldowns (I used this for the Apocalypse boss but did not need it), 3 gold executioners which would give a better damage boost than those archer cards when the enemy is below 50%, purple bishop and slayer and gold vampire for bonus healing, 2 purple knights for defense, legendary scythe, tome, and rapier.

I really enjoyed this game, with its intense skill based combat, very well designed mechanics, tons of user friendliness with information and freely being able to pause and swap stuff mid combat, and incentive to replay. The other aspects of the game were weaker but still enjoyable enough.

8.0/10

I saved my Twitch stream defeat of the final boss. Link in my bio.

Victor Vran is sort of a mix of Diablo and Bastion. From Bastion it takes the weapon system (two weapons, each weapon type has its own attacks), colour commentary (though not remotely on the same level), dodging and modular difficulty setting. The rest is just Diablo - monsters, maps and items.

It looks quite nice, there's a decent variety in monsters, the different kinds of weapons are fun and for the most part i like the map challenges. On the other hand, the story and characters are utterly forgettable, you end up using the same spell over and over again and pretty much the same goes for weapons.

And while i would recommend the game (at a discount), it does have three big flaws. Character building is too limited because it depends on items (destiny cards). The difficulty curve is all over the place and you never feel really powerful. Worst of all is the lack of health and mana regeneration. Instead of going through maps at a nice pace i often had to stop to heal and let my mana refill. That kind of goes against the whole "action" RPG thing.