Victor Vran (PC)

Note: This review is based on an Early Access version played about one month prior to full release.

I've killed more skeletons, ghosts, spiders, and vampires in the past few days than I have in the past several years – And last year I played through Diablo II again. I got an Early Access copy of a little game called Victor Vran, an ARPG where you play as a muscle-bound "Demon Hunter" whose eyes are never visible under his fedora. And while I'm writing a full review here, I can tell you up front that this game is fun as hell. Developed by Bulgarian studio Haemimont Games (makers of several RTS series as well as the last three Tropico games) and published by EuroVideo Medien, Victor Vran is set to launch on Steam and other digital platforms in just a few short weeks (July 24th). Keep reading to find out if this fast-paced ACTION role-playing game (see what I did there?) is worth the trip to the dark reaches of pop-culture Eastern Europe, and the 20 Gold it will cost you for a train ticket.

Welcome to Zagoravia; Proceed at Your Own Risk

Victor Vran takes players on a journey to the fictional city of Zagoravia, the perfect setting for a monster-slaying game, and one more setting in a long tradition of generic Eastern European-ish locations, including Freedonia, Krakozhia, Zubrowka, Sokovia, and the Transylvania of the popular imagination. The time period is just as vague-but-not-vague – it seems to be some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, judging by the characters' clothing and the steam-punk-esque technologies on display. Zagoravia has been overrun by some really nasty, demonic forces, and most of her people have been either driven off, killed, enslaved, or worst of all, transformed into undead ambinations. The demon hunter Victor arrives in Zagoravia searching for his lost friend Adrian, a fellow demon hunter. Arriving at the castle in the center of town, he agrees to help Zagoravia's queen and her court figure out just what the hell (literally) has been going on in their once pleasant little realm.

I don't want to give too much away, and some things might still change as it is, but you get the idea. Victor seems to be a sort of combination between Van Helsing and Clint Eastwood, the archetypal lone ranger with a dark past and a gravely voice. Nothing new here. The in-game action is accompanied by Victor's own comments, which often betray a dry sense of humor, as well as by a mysterious voice that is the very definition of unreliable narrator, who goads Victor on, even taunts him. You'll also run into the ghost of Tzar Borimir, former ruler of Zagoravia who is now pretty dead, but seems benevolent. The Tzar will provide you with additional details on the history of Zagoravia and how it got into this mess.

Heavy on the A and the G, Light on the R and the P

Because I enjoyed this game so much, I'm first going to write about what I didn't like about Victor Vran, so I can get it out of the way. Frankly, Victor Vran is an ARPG in only the most superficial sense; that is to say, the RPG elements in the game are extremely scant, even shallow. Anyone who's slogged through the Diablo games, perhaps the defining series of the genre, knows that the thing that drives players to spend hours and hours cutting down wave after wave of monsters is the promise of loot in the form of gear, weapons, magic items, etc. I mean, this is actually true of almost any RPG. And in this sense Victor Vran is sorely lacking. Notice I am only taking issue here because the developers and publishers have billed this game as an ARPG – if they'd have classified it as an action-packed hack-and-slash dungeon crawler with light RPG elements, I wouldn't have anything bad to say here, because that's exactly what it is.

First off, there's no armor. There are "outfits", which slightly modify factors such as health regeneration or how you build up Overdrive (more on that later), but there are no individual pieces. No cool boots that make you run faster, or armor that grants you immunity to fire, or any of the other things that have made ARPGs the highly addictive drugs that they are. You can't even put different hats on Victor unless you change his whole outfit, though you can find different dyes to make his clothing red, green, or blue. This doesn't really make a difference, however.

Then, perhaps most damningly for a game that calls itself an RPG, there is no skill system to speak of. Yes, you read that right – there is no skill tree, no skill points, no classes, no specializations. Various attacks are tied to individual weapons, but the whole skill system has been replaced by "Destiny Cards", which look like Tarot cards. As you progress through the levels, you gain more health and additional items, as well as more Destiny Card slots and Destiny Points. Each card has a number on it, indicating the amount of points required to equip it. For example, you might have five slots and 14 Destiny Points, so you can equip cards valued at 4, 3, 3, 2, and 2. These cards grant passive buffs like more HP, greater chance to land a critical hit, or a chance to cause a random explosion when you kill bad guys. Destiny Cards can be traded with merchants in the game, and there's a priest who sells them at the castle. While the Destiny Card system is pretty interesting, they don't replace a skill tree so much as the kinds of perks you'd get from armor pieces in other ARPGs.

There's some decent variety in weapons and "Demon Powers" (essentially, magic), but not all that much – at least not at this point. There are seven weapons types: swords, rapiers, scythes, and hammers; shotguns, lightning guns, and hand mortars, each of which has a regular attack (left-click) as well as two special attacks with a cooldown time, using the Q and E buttons. After leveling up a few times, you can equip two weapons at once and alternate between them by clicking the mouse wheel. This works very well actually, and there were lots of times where I had to switch in the heat of battle, and the game always picked up on it and swtiched immediately. So you won't get slowed down by switching weapons.

Weapons will have various prefixes and suffixes indicating either increased damage (prefixes) or special powers (suffixes). I found that the most useful one to have was "of Vampirism", which gives you health whenever you land a hit. Once I found a scythe that did this, I hardly used anything else, since the scythe has a spin-attack that lands several hits in a brief span of time, which meant I didn't have to use health potions as often. And speaking of potions, there are a variety of offensive as well as support potions in Victor Vran, though one thing I thought was a bit annoying is that you can't use a potion from the inventory screen, but you must equip it and then use it in-game.

Demon Powers are acquired by killing bosses and Champions, tougher versions of regular enemies. These magical attacks use fire, ice, and other elements to deal damage to your opponents or strengthen Victor himself. My favorite one was Boomerang, which throws out this spinning purple pinwheel thing that cuts through enemies and then comes back, cutting through them again. You activate Demon Powers by building up "Overdrive", a yellow bar opposite your health bar. The Overdrive meter doesn't always have to be filled – some Demon Powers can be used three or four times if you let the meter fill up. Different outfits mean different ways to generate Overdrive, but with the basic outfit, you build it up by killing enemies.

All in all, the whole system of loot and skills is pretty shallow, and provides little excitement or motivation. You can access all skills and weapons very early in the game, and most of the loot you get will be junk, which you can sell for Gold, which you can use to buy pretty much nothing useful. I realize this is typical for ARPGs, but the diversity and leveling of weapons and armor types, not to mention skills, meant that there would always be something new just around the corner. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that 1988's Mega Man 2 had a wider variety of skills, weapons, and costumes than Victor Vran.

An Arachnophobe's Dream...Or Nightmare?

One of the things I liked about Victor Vran was the enemies. While they suffer from the same limited diversity that makes the gear system so dull, they're really cool for the most part, and a whole lot of fun to kill. Different varieties of skeletons, wraiths, vampires, spiders, elemental beings, vampires, and other horrowshow creatures come at you en masse, and there is little I've found more satisfying in a game than spin-attacking a group of about 40 skeletons or spiders. You dispatch huge numbers of enemies, and every location has a challenge like "Kill 30 wraiths with ranged attacks" or "Kill 10 Champions without using Demon Powers", most of which are pretty cool to try, even though the rewards are usually lame weapons or useless Gold. Bosses are really hard, whether they are giant spiders or sadistically evil liches, and luckily there are numerous checkpoints for when you die.

The combat system in Victor Vran is what really makes the game shine, and its a shame that such a magnificent "A" is confined to a game that is mediocre in terms of the "RPG" part. It's fast-paced, action-packed, breathtaking, and innovative, as far as ARPGs go, and it reminds me of the kind of button-mashing fun and suspense of beat-'em-up arcade games in the 90s. You control Victor using the WASD keys, and use the mouse to attack and rotate the camera. Like I mentioned above, extra attacks are carried out using Q and E, and potions and Demon Powers use the 1-4 keys. I found the controls to be accurate and quick for the most part. You can also dodge and jump, which makes this game stand out among ARPGs. The weapons each have a different feel, and the ability to switch back and forth between them smoothly makes for some pretty complicated gameplay requiring skilled control, especially when using the rapier.

The one thing I really had trouble with was the camera. You can rotate it using the right mouse button, but there is no way to set it to automatically do so. This can get really confusing when you're forced to run around in circles tryig to avoid being hit. I often ended up blowing special moves and Demon Powers because I ended up facing the wrong way. And frankly, the combat is so intense that it's easy to forget to rotate the camera. I wonder how hard it could have been to set an automatic camera rotation whenever Victor turns 90 degres or something.

Smashing Pumpkins

I found the graphics in Victor Vran to be perfect for the kind of game it is. In fact, I have never played an ARPG besides Diablo where the orgy of colors on the screen didn't make me feel nauseous. The palette is just right, and characters, enemies, and objects really stand out. Everything is 3D, but looks hand-drawn. Much of the environment is destructible, especially the pumpkins, which are a lot of fun to slash and smash, just like in real life. At higher graphics settings, everything is pretty crisp, though I did find that when you're looking out over a bridge or the edge of a cliff, distant objects could look a bit washed out.

The menu screen, load screens, and inventory screens feature detailed hand-drawn images of Victor and backgrounds, mostly a big, gorgeous moon. One thing I found weird about this game is that dialogue consisted of switching back and forth between static, almost full-body images of the characters, much like cheap adventure games. Of course, since most top-down ARPGs simply let the voices run while the two charcters just stand there on screen, this is actually a step up for the genre. Cut scenes are made up of really cool limited-motion sequences that seem to come out of a storybook. Finally, the animations are smooth and look great – my favorite is the one they use when Victor attacks with the rapier.

Maps are generally pretty small and easy to explore, but secrets are too easy to find, since you can usually see secret rooms and passages on the mini-map. And because the game is 3D with a constantly rotating camera, this means they have to make certain elements invisible when you stand behind them. The problem with this is that sometimes you try to jump through an opening, only to realize it's actually a solid wall that you just can't see at the moment. Other times, you can just walk right through walls to get at secrets, but there is no rhyme or reason to this. It's also pretty arbitrary how the borders of the map are sometimes made with visible barriers and sometimes there are "invisible walls" at the edges, with no visual cue other than the fact that the minimap says so. This means that sometimes you can jump right off of cliffs, and sometimes they're just as much a barrier as solid rock.

The sound is also pretty well done. The music is appropriately spooky, sound effects match the action on the screen, and the voice acting is not bad at all, even if a bit clichéd at times. I'm not sure whether or not the writers were native speakers of English, Bulgarian, or German (the game is available in English and German at the moment), but I could find none of the language quirks that tend to characterize games created by European developers who know just enough English to think they know it all. So hats off to Haemimont in the language department.

And Everything Else

One more feature I'd like to mention is Transmutation, a system that allows you to upgrade and create new weapons and potions. While the system is pretty straightforward, and the selection of recipes is pretty vast, this is a part of the game that could have been put to much better use if they had an actual gear system and more variety in the weapons. Also, some restrictions seemed arbitrary: I tried to make a rapier with the "of Vampirism" trait, and I used all the correct ingredients to do so, but the game would not let me transmute. They don't tell you the reason why, or indicate which item is wrong, and I was still able to do so with any other weapon but the rapier. Of course, this might also be a bug, so maybe I'll have to wait till the final release and several patches to get my Rapier of Vampirism, or at least an explanation why I can't.

Though I didn't get to play it much, there is a co-op system that allows up to 4 players, but in a game with no character classes that focuses on the adventures of a lone-wolf hunter, this seems unecessary, and it's kind of dull to play through the game as four different copies of the same dude. They've also added a PvP arena called The Freakshow, which is unlocked at level 26, and an endless PvE battelground called The Bottomless Pit, unlocked at level 36. The Bottomless Pit sounds cool (I haven't reached level 36 yet), but I can't imagine PvP is all that fun when everyone is the same character.