GB Feature: The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III Review

We've rounded off a full set of critiques for the entirety of Neocore's The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing trilogy by wrangling up a two-page review for the recently released third installment. Here's a bit of what to expect from the tone:

The campaign takes place over several maps, where each map contains a bunch of monsters to kill and usually a quest or two to complete. The monsters are colorful and there is a wide variety to them, but most of their differences are more cosmetic than meaningful. Generally, action RPGs come with several enemies that you have to pay attention to -- healers, spawners, glass cannons and so forth -- but in Van Helsing III I only encountered a couple. One vampire creature could freeze me briefly, and one spirit had a nasty cold spell, and that was it. I was able to just grind through everything else, and it was a rare occurrence when I had to change my tactics, or use tactics at all.

In fact, the combat was so easy for my Protector that it got a little boring. My Protector only died four times during the campaign, and it was always during a boss fight when he was swarmed by enemies. Normal battles held no challenge at all, and I just had to slog through them to get to the interesting boss battles. I'm not sure if this was an issue with the Protector class being too powerful, or the "hard" difficulty setting being too easy, or some combination of the two. Later, I sampled some of the other classes on the "heroic" setting, and I actually had to work a little, so the game can probably be made challenging regardless of your skill level.