Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Almost, but not quite"

From a personal point of view the game was a nice experience and purchase balanced inside a very long title. It has the classic setting of a one man army against the monster legions of hell accompanied by a lady ghost friend that can provide some good comical feedback to counter the serious Van Helsing.
The story is well constructed, but it has no dramatic twists or surprises, pure and simple there is a baddy ruining the landscape view and you need to deal with him.
The world itself is well depicted and presented, without vivid colors all the more to enforce the grim locations you visit, at first it is a Gothic setting of what you would expect in a 18 century Transylvania, later it slowly descends into a steam punk city, but not too heavy. The lack of free-cam is a minus for the moments when you really wanna turn the camera or have at least a 50 degree fan pan. This however is a small inconvenience that doesn't change the fact that the world is authentic and charming.
The characters populating this world are a grotesque of what you would expect in a grim setting, more often they are funny than serious using well known cliches and remarks to even further the grotesque. Most would say the voice acting is bad, when it actually enforces the grotesque that these characters are. One can notice this by simply comparing you main heroes dialogues with that of anything else. It places your normal hero and his friend in a strange land and this theme just enforces even further the difference between the two parties. However your hero and his friend are left flat and two dimensional personality wise and you only learn bits of their stories, which is really a shame if this game ever goes beyond one title. The same goes for the monsters you fight, It would of been cool to have a monster-pedia in game where one can read about the monster and learn its weaknesses. Also a backlog of your conversations would of been nice as well, because some of those conversations are important for secrets.
Last but not least the game-play, its fast, its fun, but it can get repetitive when you learn how to kite the swarm of monsters. Of course you can stand there and take the punishment but it doesn't work every time. The specials you charge up are a nice mechanic that can offer different combos but sometimes they feel slow to charge and you really need them to deal with the serious zerg swarms. As a RPG it has ability points, the surprise however is the presence of "Luck" which modifies magic find, dodge and critical damage all in one, on one side you get to control your magic find chance which in most games is done item-side only which is good, however the critical damage makes it part of any viable build, because critical damage is the one thing that hurts monsters at higher levels the most especially bosses. You have skill points you can spend on a variety of attacks and passives, however you quickly find that crowd control skills are worth investing in heavily because you almost always are outnumbered and the cases of a 1 on 1 boss fights are rare, which mostly diminishes the point of single target skills. There are monsters that require a 1 on 1 approach but they are easily taken out by your crowd skills given enough time. The skill system is quite inventive you can use ranged and melee weapons and you can swap between two sets of a primary and secondary attack on each. If you don't remap your keys however you might have a hard time getting along with the mechanics because the defaults are very random.
The game as of the moment does not tackle replay-ability well nor end-game content but the developers have said that there will be releasing content across the year.

In short The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is a game that has a very long title, it has a well depicted grim slash steam punk world with charming low saturation graphics making it very attractive, a fast tempo game-play with some repetitive elements, a range of monsters that you would expect but without any special tactic to deal with them, a story that is somewhat interesting but without any twists, funny main hero banter but flat two dimensional personalities, exciting but unmemorable soundtrack, voice acting good at enforcing the grotesque nature of characters and very little end-game and replay value content. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed the game and what it provides for its price is amazing however like my classification it is almost up on the top but not quite. I was hoping for a Dungeon Siege 2 length of game-play and replay-ability but this is ok too, compared to other stuff.