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.
