Van Helsing

"Not even Lucifer is claiming responsibility for this unholy mess"

I hate movie-to-game tie-ins in principle, and the reverse generally holds true. I don't let such things deter me from playing and even enjoying such tie-ins, but here's the catch: they have to be at least halfway decent. While Van Helsing looks like a great movie to while away an hour or two, this game (which will take about as much time to beat) is so utterly bad, it's almost an affront to gaming. Combine the gameplay of Baldur's Gate with a botched attempt at the style of Devil May Cry and stick a movie character in there and you have a recipe for disaster.

Graphics

Think Baldur's Gate. Got that in mind? Great, you don't need to know anymore. For the rest of you, the game takes place in a quasi-3D environment. Helsing and his enemies are the same sort of polygon-looking models in Baldur's Gate and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which means they look terrible compared to decent sprite palettes. The game hardly pushes the GBA's hardware, if at all. There's no lighting, the environments are bland, and a good deal of the game is simple white snow. Yuck. The enemies are uninspired and have only the most basic animation to convince you they're actually alive and not part of the background. In short, this is not the eye candy you're looking for.

Sound

There's an option to adjust the sound effects and music volume, but you'll have to crank the music up to the max in order to even hear it. I was straining with headphones. It's not even good music! It sounds remarkably similar to a funeral dirge, and it hardly changes. The only things you can hear are the noises of Helsing beating on the enemy, and vice-versa. Oh yeah, don't forget the monster death screams. Can't forget the monster death screams.

Gameplay

Who's the goddamn philistine that tried to put Devil May Cry on the GBA? Seriously, this game borrows heavily from DMC play mechanics while pulling off a worse rendition of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. So let's get started, shall we?

First off, the game follows the movie fairly closely, at least from what I've seen of previews and trailers. You start in a monastery somewhere and learn the basics of the game. The B button is your melee attack, A button uses your guns, L button uses the grappling hook and R button lets you jump. That last button is so incredibly underused they might as well have just left it out and stuck in a function for the game to magically become more fun. They probably would've pulled it off better.

I'll start with the weaponry. You have what I can only assume is some sort of brass knuckle/knife thing for your melee attack, which does a decent amount of damage to your enemies, but it's only useful for two or three levels before enemies start getting melee attacks of their own, ones that hit you multiple times before you can get away and end up nearly killing you. "So use your guns!" you say. Well, they sorta suck. Okay, that's not quite fair, but...well, yeah, it's fair. Your melee weapon does 4-5 damage to any given enemy, while your regular guns do 1 damage. Yeah. You have infinite ammunition and you later get a crossbow that does about as much damage as your melee, thankfully. Well...you've still got problems. Trying to maneuver yourself on this quasi-3D plane is frustrating, because you can barely see the crossbow bolts as they fly, so it's hard to situate yourself besides trying to align yourself with the enemy either vertically or horizontally. This problem is solved a little later with your third and final weapon, the electron gun. This gun is the most powerful, doing 15-20 damage to any given monster, but it has to charge a second before it can fire, and you have to stand still while it's doing that, leaving you vulnerable. It gets worse. If you happen to be moving slightly while firing your guns (regular and crossbow) then you will inexorably slide in the direction you're facing, almost always straight toward your enemy and pain. You basically have to stop moving, get yourself pointed straight and make damn sure you're not in motion before firing, because even the slightest tap on the D-pad causes you to slide. I don't know what the hell the programmers were doing when they coded that, but I suspect there was drugs involved.

Let's move on to the game itself. It's almost identical to Baldur's Gate in terms of gameplay. You have to wander around various areas, killing monsters and eventually fighting bosses. The areas are less maze-like than BG, and you won't have to find keys or anything to proceed. There are some instances where you are forced to kill all the enemies on the screen before moving on, but those don't pop up terribly often till later in the game. Also, in a very obvious homage to Devil May Cry, you have glyphs. These glyphs come in four colors: red, gold, blue and green. Collect four red glyphs, and you increase your life meter. Collect 40 green glyphs to get an extra life. Gold glyphs...serve no purpose. Oh, I'm sure the developers meant for them to do something, but...they don't. Blue glyphs are your healing glyphs, and there's a lot of them. Every enemy drops one, so any damage you sustained fighting them will be restored.

The grappling hook is useful for quite a few areas in the game, as it's used to get to high ledges and snag those hard-to-reach red glyphs, and is even used in escaping a particular level. The jump button, however, is used in perhaps one or two spots to get a glyph, and is not required at all to complete the game. Great job, VU.

Replay Value

None, zero, zilch. The game can be beaten in less time than the movie, and it's much less fun. There's a password system in place to make things easier, and the developers were even kind enough to include one that lets you view the credits in case you want to know who to blame for this mess. There's no hidden options, no unlockables, no freaking nothing. Plus, if you haven't seen the movie (like me) then don't play this, as it will spoil the end of the movie for you. Now if you'll excuse me, I must find my sledgehammer... bwahaha...

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 05/08/04, Updated 05/09/04