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I played The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing earlier this year and thought it was a great action RPG. In fact, I even reviewed it for this site. I highly suggest taking a look at my review right here. Now that that’s out of the way, I can now talk about the Complete Pack that has just released on Steam.
Much like an expansion of sorts with some additional features, the Complete Pack includes the original game, the three pieces of DLC that were released and a huge patch that also comes to the original game, offering up a new PvP mode, respawning enemies, new loot, reworked netcode and a new mode that allows players that have completed the story mode to continue playing with their characters.
The DLC that was released was two new classes and a new skill tree for Van Helsing’s companion, Lady Katarina. The two new classes offer up some new strategies as well as some new skills. The Thaumaturge is an arcane master that utilizes magic and elemental damage. He will use up a lot of mana during his attacks so it is imperative to keep mana restoring potions handy. To counter this, he has some really great skills that both steal mana from enemies and even damages surrounding enemies when he runs out of mana completely.
The Arcane Mechanic is the king of machines and utilizes bots and turrets to take out his enemies. He also carries a blasting backpack and gun that is best for lobbing different types of grenades and fires flames from a distance. To top it all off, Lady Katarina gets herself a whole new skill tree to put points into called Blue Blood. Here, players can make her even more deadly by upping her attack power and rate of attack as well as slowing down enemies and creating a nice explosion that damages everything in the area when she dies…again.
Now, I will be fair, the game is still brutal. This is one of those old-school feeling RPG’s almost like I stepped back in time and started playing Diablo II again. Even with the new classes and new skill tree in place for Katarina, the game is no cake walk.
The co-op net code seems to be working well at the moment of this writing. Now, I’m not much for PvP in an RPG of this kind, but I welcome any and all content to Van Helsing. So, I gave this a try. It is one hectic affair with numerous players running around trying to kill everyone with a ton of spells and attacks taking up much of the screen. It was a bit disorienting. Many times, I couldn’t make out where exactly my character was.
They even added controller support that works surprisingly well. It takes some getting used to, but after a few hours with it, it was actually intuitive. I never thought they could map all the attacks and modifiers, but they did and did it well.
There’s not much more to say. The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing was a fantastic game and the Complete Pack adds all the extras that were released. Aside from the three pieces of DLC, everything else is patched into the original game so if you already own the game, you have the patches. All you need now are the DLC classes and Lady Katarina skill tree. If you don’t already own the game itself, pick up the complete pack and get it all in one fell swoop. You won’t be sorry. The game was and still is great and the new additions make it even better. For $20, you get a game that is right up there with Torchlight II.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
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