Van Helsing’s Final Cut is the most ‘Incredible’ yet

Unless you’ve already played

Recently, NeocoreGames released The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut on Steam, a compilation of the three games in the series. Past titles have varied in quality; the first game was good but buggy, the second was a solid step up, and the final game took several steps back in design.

While the inner workings of the games varied throughout the series, Final Cut keeps everything standard all throughout. Seeing as the last one was easily the worst of the three, this had me quite nervous. Thankfully, the developers took some great steps with the direction of Final Cut, easily making it the best way to play the trilogy.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut (PC)
Developer: NeocoreGames
Publisher: NeocoreGames
MSRP: $44.99
Released: November 6, 2015 

For those unaware, the Van Helsing series is an action-RPG in the vein of Diablo or Titan Quest. There’s skills, loot, bosses, loot, NPC shops, and more loot. One of the biggest changes between games was how Van Helsing leveled up. The third game made leveling dull and simple, and even lowered the maximum level by a lot.

Final Cut, however, takes few cues from the third game. The biggest decision that carries over are the six classes. Now, players can go through the entirety of the campaign as the classes introduced in the third installment: Protector, Bounty Hunter, Elementalist, Umbralist, Phlogistoneer, and Constructor.

The skill tree is back to being an actual tree, which means that players will have to take prerequisite skills in order to unlock more powerful ones. In addition, certain levels of skills also require the player to be high enough level to obtain; the second tier of skills requires level 20, while the third requires level 40.

One of the biggest changes comes with leveling up a character’s stats. Previously, there were five standard categories to dump points into, but now there are only three. While it may seem like losing options, it really streamlines the process and puts more weight on the three categories, instead of having a few useless ones like before. Neocore has also added a ton of endgame content, but the story is definitely the biggest draw. The mechanics are solid, but not quite solid enough to keep people playing indefinitely like other games in the genre.

The issue is, the game crashes. A bunch. Neocore can never seem to get away from technical problems, it seems. I’ve had the game crash on the main menu, and just about every time I try to alt-tab out, the process just disappears. Judging from the forums and Steam reviews, this is a relatively common issue. Load times are long as well, though I do not have Final Cut installed on my SSD, which would likely speed up the process.

Otherwise, this is exactly what players should expect from a trilogy compilation. Thankfully, Neocore has taken some solid feedback from the community when creating Final Cut. I have issues with the basic design of the game’s difficulty (more baddies = HARDER!!!), but if you are an ARPG fan and have neglected the series up until now, this is the best opportunity to dive right in.