Van Helsing and Marvel Heroes Preview

Superficially they look poles apart but upcoming games Marvel Heroes and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing have plenty in common. They’re both action-RPGs with heavy emphasis on the action. They’re both eschew complex skill interactions in favour of hitting hard and hitting fast. And they’re both beautiful games.

Okay, that’s a bit tenuous but look, the action is similar. Around all the trapping of skill choices and specialisations and levelling up, gameplay pretty much boils down to this:

1. Click on things
2. Mash all the buttons

Here are some more details.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

Van Helsing is a single-player action-RPG where you play the famous monster-slayer’s son. It’s a handy excuse for starting you at the bottom of the heap with no impressive skills and a complete lack of talent.

Wielding either your sword or your trusty gun or relying on magic, you’ll run around a host of isometric viewpoint platforms shooting hordes of underlings and kiting around bosses. You can switch weapons on the fly so if you accidentally run into a much larger group than you expected, you can use tricks like magic to slow down the group while you run away and blast them with the gun.

Mechanically, it’s all very standard. Killing things will level you up, giving you ability points to assign across Body (i.e. HP), Dexterity, Mana, and Luck. On the PC you click to walk and click to aim, which does my head in no end but should be instantly comfortable for Diablo fans.

Bosses will have unique powers, as you might expect – the one I was pitted against was a big lad surrounded by a permanent aura of slowness. Obviously the solution there is to stay as far away as possible so you don’t get crippled and then walloped about the head.

You won’t be looking for weapon drops in this game. Instead, you’ll find “essences” along the way, which can be applied to your weapons as upgrades.

This game is being developed by Neocore, a studio better known for real-time-strategy game Crusaders and RTS/RPG hybrid King Arthur II – The Role-playing Wargame. I’m glad they’ve chosen to focus on a genre this time and it looks like a decent game, if a little unremarkable. This game will need some truly engaging writing to stand out from the crowd.

Here’s a gameplay trailer:

Marvel Heroes

By contrast, Marvel Heroes is a free-to-play MMO (of sorts). Coming from Diablo creator David Brevik, we’ve been promised that the game will not feature an energy system that limits your progress unless you pay money. It will be funded by microtransactions, the details of which were not yet established.

Like Van Helsing, Marvel Heroes also uses an isometric viewpoint and has you click to walk and to target. The game is all about letting you be the Marvel heroes that you love, so expect to see plenty of Wolverines, Deadpools and Spider-Mans (Spidermen?) running around. To help distinguish yourself in the crowd, loot drops and quest rewards are focused around costumes from different eras of the iconic characters.

The action will happen in “public combat zones” – 15 to 20 players sharing a Diablo-style map, so it’s less “massively multiplayer online” and more “online-only” RPG. Hey, at least they’ve integrated that into the game design instead of just forcing online checks into a single-player game. There are no traditional class types – every character has his own playstyle so you won’t have to worry about balancing healer/tank/DPS groups.

The game is based largely on the 616 world and Dr Doom has the Cosmic Cube – the Tesseract from the recent Avengers film. You’ll see famous locations like MutantTown, Savage Land and the X-Mansion. Critically-acclaimed comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis is writing the single-player campaign story. This won’t change depending on what character(s) you choose, though you might have a few character relationship moments highlighted.

As someone whose exposure to the Marvel Universe is limited to the films and the 90s X-Men cartoon, it left me cold. The combat skills, at least on Wolverine, didn’t have much interplay so it was a simple case of mashing the three skill buttons over and over again. The ability to switch characters on the fly is nice but I doubt there will be a host of cross-character combinations that you can pull off solo. Maybe the draw of playing as a 1940s version of Captain America is enough for some? I don’t know.

But I suppose it’s free, isn’t it?

Marvel Heroes will definitely be coming to PC and most likely to Mac as well.