I ve been playing all of the Van Helsings so far and was pretty happy when I saw a new installment is upcoming. Sadly so far the third part ofI ve been playing all of the Van Helsings so far and was pretty happy when I saw a new installment is upcoming. Sadly so far the third part of the Van Helsing saga is not too promising. As this is an early review, I might come back and update it but so far this is only a 6/10 to me.
I m playing this on my PS4 Pro SSD on performance mode and I have to say that the performance is not exactly that perfect. With many enemies on the map and special effects coming up, I still encounter frame drops which is a little bit disappointing. Mostly it is not too troublesome but it should not happen at all. Loading times are okay-ish. Considering a PS4 Pro with SSD the loading and porting times are not too fancy I have to say. Cant say how much worse it gets on standard HDD but it might take a bit.
Gameplay on console feels also a little bit clunky. I think that exploding items are sometimes very hard to get perfectly targeted, same goes to shots with ranged characters. It might be a minor hunch but in comparison to other titles it is not super smooth. People who are looking for higher difficulties will probably be very happy. Hard difficulty proves to be not a run through with even higher difficulties possible and on top a hardcore mode is available. Veterans surely will be satisfied by this.
Character itemization is pretty wide. There is a lot of gear to be found and attached to either the main character or your companion. Other games do better in terms of displaying what you have and how good it is on the actual ingame character. The damage display feels weirdly off sometimes. The raw dmg seems a lot higher, dps seems lower, when compared some weapons dont seem to differ much which is a little bit irritating. There are multiple instances of perk trees, skill trees and character stats which will provide a decent depths and complexity which I normally embrace. This time it does not feel that appealing to me. Extending variety is brought by your companion which also has different skill trees and can be configured in terms of AI handling. There is a wide set of characters you can choose from, with different emphasize on mage, melee, ranged arms man etc.
The visual presentation is okay, nothing spectacular in my opinion, same goes to the audio experience that the game is providing. After all the time the third installment feels a bit rusty. Some UI elements could be a little bit bigger and some people may have issues with that, but as always this is somewhat subjective.
Van Helsing 3 provides a city hub that gives different content to the player such as a city defense mode that can be compared to games such as Orcs Must Die or Dungeon Defenders. The hub is also starting point for main and sub quests, also it brings a variety of merchants plus another type of companion that you can send on missions without spoiling too much.
I can summarize some disappointment on my side. The game is pretty cheap to grab and features around 6 to 10hrs of gameplay depending on your own play style and experience. I encountered some blue screens which is also a no-go for me. The performance issues are disappointing also, considering the graphics are no rocket science and I m trying to play this game on a PS4 Pro with SSD. Genre fans and Van Helsing veterans still might be tempted to grab it early and surely will have their satisfaction in returning to this very special world. I would rather wait for some patchwork to be done and maybe also a slight price drop. Although paying 15 bucks for this game is not too much of misspick either.… Expand
