Van Helsing

Wow does this game desperately want to be devil may cry, it largely succeeds at that but that doesn't mean it's among the most engaging games out there.

If you've played any of the dmc games, then you've more or less played this game as Van Helsing controls and behaves exactly like Dante throughout the campaign (dmc 2 Dante in the case of the latter) as he fights off waves of enemies in cramped environments to achieve massive combos to increase his score in each level. Each level is capped off with a boss fight which is one of the creatures that he faces in the film, although he fights several of them multiple times which takes away the satisfaction of beating them unless they die on screen. I get the feeling this was meant to be an expansion pack for dmc2 rather than a game tie in for the film as the story barely follows the plot of the film, this is evident with the boss fights as everyone dies at the hands of our hero in this game rather than being killed by other means, this being evident with Igor and Aleera who aren't killed and are killed by anna respectively in the film. Frankenstein’s monster is fought twice here even though he doesn't die in either fight, admittedly this does line up with the film where he's one of the few survivors in the story. Like most 00s games, the campaign starts from the beginning once it's completed, this is important to bring up as it's not possible to collect everything in your first playthrough which was another common troupe of games from around this time.

Much like the film, this game is average. It borrows elements from greater source material to tell a story that's decent but unremarkable.