Van Helsing

Game Overview by Mike Finkelstein

I doubt there are very many people that would defend 2004’s Van HelsingAfter two successful Mummy movies, Universal had big plans for a whole monster universe by 2004. The first film to launch it, Van Helsing, also managed to put those ambitions in the dirt for nearly a decade. as a good movie. Sure, there are those that like the movie as a cheesy, stupid time, reveling in the big, dumb action of it all, but even the film's defenders generally agree that the film is stupid and silly, enjoyable because of its flaws and not in spite of them. Most would have preferred something better, more polished, better written. A film that could have stood alongside the 1999 The MummyA relaunch of the classic Universal Monster, The Mummy was a surprise smash hit that traded horror for high-fly, Indiana Jones-style adventure. as both something cheesy and actually, legitimately good for the right reasons. Such was not the case.

Universal was banking on Van Helsing being another hit. Both The Mummy and its sequel, The Mummy ReturnsSequel to Universal's 1999 monster relaunch, The Mummy Returns was bigger in every way than the original, with one hundred percent more The Rock., had been smash hits at the Box Office, so Universal went all in on Van Helsing, which had the same writer / director as the two Mummy films, Steven Sommers. Unfortunately a bloated budget alongside returns that didn’t match either of the Mummy films left Van Helsing barely breaking even at the Box Office, if it wasn’t just an out-and-out flop. That spelled bad news for any sequels to the movie, as well as the franchise as a whole that Universal had plotted. And that includes the video game based on the movie.

Very likely most readers of this site didn’t even realize that Van Helsing even had a video game based on it. The game came out the same year as the failed movie, right smack in the middle of Koji Igarashi’s high point for MetroidvaniaAt the intersection of Metroid and Castlevania lies the exploration platformer genre, the game style with heroes wandering expansive worlds, looking for items to expand their quest, known as Metroidvania. titles. It was a gothic action adventure game featuring a whip-toting, leather-clad hero going up against hordes of vampires. If that doesn’t sound like Castlevania, few titles would, but in a video game landscape dominated by Castlevania games and, more importantly for this game’s fate, Devil May Cry titles (and its various clones), Van Helsing wasn’t able to stand out.

To be clear, this game is as much a Devil May Cry clone as the two 3D Castlevania titles that IGA oversaw. Tight rooms filled with monsters, zones to clear and then re-explore later. Big bosses with large health bars and patterns to learn and exploit. This game hewed close to Devil May Cry, likely because it saw that Castlevania took the same inspiration and it wanted to play with the big boys. And in some ways (just not when it came to sales) the game did compete well. It’s a decently competent, action-filled game that compares well at least to the Castlevania series. It couldn’t touch Devil May Cry, but then few games in this genre could, but what it does, it does reasonably well with little difficulty or weirdness.

The game loosely follows the plot of the film. Our hero, the eponymous Helsing, starts out with a prelude in Paris, France, hunting down Mr. Hyde. This is the introductory tutorial section that teaches the player about platforming, weapon usage, and battling before the meat of the adventure begins. Because, from here, we’re dropped into Transylvania where our hero has to blast through gobs of enemies, from a village, to a manor, through back woods, to Castle Frankenstine and, eventually, to Castle Dracula, all to take on the fiendish vampire, his wives, and any other monster that stands in his way. And there are a lot of monsters because this is an action game, first and foremost.

The basic gameplay of Van Helsing will seem familiar to anyone that has played Devil May Cry or, say, Castlevania: Lament of InnocenceThe first title in the series for the Sony PlayStation 2, Lament of Innocence gave us the first glimpse of the earliest hero in the main series, Leon Belmont, he who first had to engage against the vampires by taking up a magical whip and knocking around the worst foes of the undead world.. The hero, Van Helsing, will wander into a chamber (a room of a castle, a clearing in the woods, a courtyard in town) and monsters will spawn. If it’s the first time exploring that room then, likely, the chamber will lock down and you’ll need to kill all the spawning enemies in the room before you can progress. After, whenever you come to that chamber again in that level you can run past the enemies, if you like, or kill them all again just because.

Killing enemies in this game, even if you don’t need to, does provide some benefit. Enemies will drop spendable currency, glyphs, that you can collect for upgrades. It’s like experience points, except without a full leveling system, instead letting you buy items and powers you might need along the way. The hero can collect a few things for their arsenal, from limited use grenades, to various types of ammunition for their weapons, all of which is quickly at the ready in combat with the flick of a menu and the press of a button.

Combat itself is a mix of melee and ranged attacks. Van Helsing starts with a set of melee spin-blades and a basic ranged attack in the form of his double pistols, but over time he will find upgrades for both. A shotgun, a stake launcher, a shock cannon, and a gatling gun all come into play over time in the game, along with new ammunition types for each, plus he’ll also find double scimitars to upgrade his melee, and these can have a flaming “ammunition” type as well. This can lead to a lot of options for your combat experience over the flow of the game.

Can, but likely won’t. While playing through the game, I found that combat, despite its various options, was incredibly limited. Any room you wander into will only spawn one type of enemy. Each room will have its own type, but only one kind per room, so any room will have a long spawn of the same kind of enemy over and over. Each enemy type is more susceptible to a specific kind of attack, so you might want to use the stake launcher on bats or the shogun on skeletons. This would be interesting if you had to deal with a variety of enemy types in a single room, quickly flicking between weapons on the fly as you rolled and dodged bad guys in the thick of it. That never occurs, though, because the enemy selections are always limited in the rooms.

To make matters worse, the flow of combat never feels good. The chambers are usually oddly shaped, sometimes with objects in the middle of the room and weird camera angles designed to show only one side or one part of the chamber. This can make it hard to see where all the enemies are in a room, especially in conjunction to where you’re at. In these situations, which are plentiful in the game, even using melee feels like a losing proposition. You’re better off picking a weapon, aiming it randomly around the room, letting the auto-lock for your attacks take hold, and blindly firing into the mass until everything dies. It’s not engaging, it’s tedious.

The game does provide plenty of collectibles to grab, from health increases and ammo expansions to the whole variety of weapons you’ll gain. The health and ammo is only mildly useful, with the game providing you a huge, locked off energy bar you can steadily unlock, but for both fully unlocking everything isn’t really needed. The game is easy enough, despite itself, that I only bothered collecting the things that were on the main path, never doubling back to previous missions to pick up anything I had to skip because I didn’t have the right weapon. I never felt the need because, especially with extra refills I could store in my inventory, it wasn’t necessary. The game didn’t ever challenge me enough that I felt like I had to fully get everything, which also says a lot about the gameplay since I didn’t want to explore further.

The weapon unlocks, meanwhile, could provide some level of Metroidvania gameplay, but hardly ever do. Some weapons have secondary abilities, like the stake launcher having explosive tips, or the shock weapon and its ability to power lifts and other machinery. If these abilities were more integral to exploration, maybe in a castle that was open and freeform in its structure, these weapon abilities would be interesting. But Van Helsing is mission based, with rigid levels, so if you need an ability you can be assured you’ll likely get it one or two screens over from where you’re supposed to use it, and then that ability is only useful for picking up out of the way power-ups after that point. The structure is too limited in scope and it feels like instead of encouraging exploration it actively discourages it.

And then there’s the visual design of the game, which is drab, dreary, and boring. Everything in the game is the same kinds of rocky greys and blues, with grey skies and dingy enemies. Nothing stands out, nothing is interesting, it’s all blandness from one stage to the next. The best looking things in Van Helsing are the main characters, the hero, his companion Anna, and Dracula, and all three are only good looking in comparison to the rest of the game. Yes, they generally look like the characters from the film, but they’re all slightly off. Van Helsing himself often has an open mouthed sneer on his face, as if the game glitched. Dracula wanders around with dead eyes, blindly staring at everything. And Anna, well, she’s barely in the game enough to make an impact, but at least her character model looks okay.

On basically all fronts, this is a limited game that feels like it was grasping for bigger ideas but didn’t have the time to get those ideas working. You can feel the bones of an interesting exploration adventure built in the style of Devil May Cry and Castlevania, but either the team didn’t have the knowledge on how to make that work as well as it could or, more likely, they were working on a deadline and had to rush out something playable from the bones they built. I wanted to like Van Helsing while playing it because I could feel it reaching to be something more… but the game let me down at every turn. It’s function, even mildly playable in places, but never, ever good.

Sadly, the console versions of this title are still better than the Game Boy Advance version, which is a nigh unplayable mess. Bad graphics, but design, and worst, boring stage layouts that actively punish the player the whole time. It was widely panned by everyone upon its release, and has become a much hated curio even among players that like the console version. I can’t really recommend the console edition of Van Helsing, but I will actively discourage anyone from even bothering with its GBA port. Just don’t.