Victor Vran

I don't regret buying the game, since I've spent around 50 hours playing it, but I have to admit it is not great. I compare it to Diablo and other classic games of the genre (called ARPG, but the RPG aspect only means you level up and increase stats, don't expect dialogues, choices, character development etc.) Positive: + simple combat, but has some variety: all 8 (10 with Motörhead) weapons have a different skillset and plays differently, you can further customise your style with destiny cards, talismans, etc. + tons of maps and challanges + local coop to play on a shared screen with a friend (also online multiplayer naturally) + lots of little jokes + a lot of excellent map design and challanges + you don't need to keep several characters: you don't spec in anything via skills, and your inventory is virtually endless, so you can change your whole character anytime while keeping everything Negative: - story is nonexistent, even when some dialogues show up you skip them since they are uninteresting - the "simple" becomes tedious after a while. Tons of content, but most of them are either repetitive, or requires so much grinding that it is masochistic (no, I will not grind for 40 hours to get the last normal challange on the map just to prove something to myself - you basically can't find any useful stuff after a while. Top gears require crafting, thus a ton of grinding. So there is no excitement from a drop system, you just gather everything in your endless inventory and sometimes sell stuff or craft them. There are a few dozen legendary items with unique attributes, but most of them are actually weaker than well crafted rares Personal: - the gameplay is so simple that you can watch movies while playing. That can be good or bad, depends on what you seek. - Motörhead worths the price, fractured world only gives you 5 endless random dungeons. - buy it on sale, doesn't worth the full price

Victor Vran starts super trong as it combines the good parts from many other games and streamlines them. Although that has its drawbacks already: the game doesn't really seem to have a personality of its own. For example it actually took me a while to realize the setting is actually steampuk victorian England, because VV resembles the style of Diablo (visuals, music) so much, its unique features are overshadowed by it. That said, the action is solid, so what's the problem, right? Well, the game runs out of steam rather quickly. The skill progression is pretty much insignificant, leveling up mostly grants you just higher health or something equally mediocre (and sometimes not even the health). There are only a handful of weapon types which don't complement each other very well and they get boring rather quickly. Who would think that something so cool like a lightning gun can get boring? But it does - if it takes several seconds to kill anything, hearing the bzzzzt - pscht - bzzzzt - pscht without any variation sucks out the feeling of action from the game. The loot system is the worst part. It's just terrible. I got my best hammer and lightning gun about 1/4th into the game - both hugely overpowered at first, but since the game kept dropping just mediocre trash otherwise, I had to stick with those 2 weapons until the end, by which point, of course, I was not only bored out of my mind (imagine using the same 2 weapons for the duration of the whole Diablo game) but the weapons were also greatly insuficient. Even though I understand it's more 'action' than 'RPG', the action part doesn't do enough carry the game. Without the excitement of progression and loot which other ARPGs provide, Victor Vran loses its steam and becomes just mediocre . Note: I've not played MP.

I started off really enjoying Victor Vran. The honeymoon slowly ended though and by halfway through the game I was starting to notice things I didn’t like and then by the end I was just hoping to finish the game and be done with it. Overall the game does many things really well and many things very poorly. The voice acting was a mixed bag just like rest. I instantly noticed the voice of Vran was done by the same man who voices Geralt on The Witcher: Doug Cockle. He does a great job here as well. The voice that is in Victor’s head for the journey is also well done and has some nice comic relief. Maria Teresa Creasey and Deborah Mock who voiced Queen Katerina and Irene both did a terrible job though. Just wooden work with no emotion. The difficulty curve was a broken mess. The game was either insanely difficult or insanely easy all the way through. There were times on casual difficulty where a few enemies were killing me within 3-5 seconds from full health where on normal difficulty many mini bosses were cut through like butter. The game also incorporated many game mechanics I despise. You beat a boss only to have them come back to life and have to be beaten again, enemies who can continue to spawn multiple enemies, bosses with regen health, oh this game has all of those and some have more than one of these crappy mechanics. The save system was also poorly done. So the game auto saves during a level but if you have to exit the level and come back due to work, school, etc then when you reload the game all of the enemies, including bosses, are alive again and back where they were. Basically don’t travel from the hub to an area without the free time to beat that whole area which I don’t enjoy. Now this may seem like I hated the game but I didn’t. The actual gameplay was enjoyable and there was a huge amount of customization you can do to Victor. The sheer variety of weapons, destiny cards and powers you can have can make for pretty much any kind of character build and play style you can think of. The story was well done as well and the main reason I kept playing the game. Overall the game was a mixed bag. Some parts were great and others were terrible with no middle ground. I find it tough to recommend which is sad because the core of the game is good and has a story worth playing through but it is riddled with so many things that I despise. Basically if the things I hate are things you love then you may not care. Another thing I will mention is that the game ran fantastic, 60FPS all the way through, and didn’t crash once. There were 9 different graphicical settings to play with and AA/AF. I wish there was more choices for AA than just FXAA or none but that’s a minor gripe. I finished the game in 13 hours 11 minutes on a combo of normal and casual difficulty. My system: AMD FX-9590 | 16GB DDR3-2133 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.0.3 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Solus 3 | Kernel 4.15.18-67.current My score: 6.5/10

Old crusty gamer chiming in. Victor Vran is quite the oddball of a game. Clearly a lot of effort went into creating a game with a nice atmosphere reminiscent of classic monster movies. The music and game world do seem to come alive and the voice acting is decent. However, the game play is lackluster. As an ARPG this game just doesn't give the player any sense of character progression in any meaningful way. This game tries for several gameplay mechanics that don't normally appear in ARPG games, such as the destiny cards and there are no stat points to assign. I think it is great that the developers tried to spice things up with new mechanics but I didn't find myself carefully pouring over all the stats on the cards and instead went through most of the game with some of the first cards I ever found. Unfortunately, as you level up you don't really get to decide much outside of which cards to swap out or what two magic spells you might want to use. The loot that drops also adds to this meaningless feeling I felt towards my character. The items were fairly boring and coupled with the spell system that I thought was pretty barebones, I just didn't feel excited about the next boss fight or the next area to explore. Near the end of the game I felt that I just wanted to finish the game and I had no interest in replaying anything. I liked the idea that each area had certain challenges you could do but again my character felt hollow so I wasn't motivated to stray too far from the main plot points of the game. Overall I rated this game two stars as an "ok" game because it has a nice atmosphere to it and the game was stable on my PC. I appreciate that the developers tried for some new ideas but I found this game to be a rather dull ARPG. I would recommend this game to people who might not want to pour over endless stats and instead enjoy a game that is close to an action game than to a traditional hack'n'slash game.

Victor Vran has an amazing atmosphere (created in Bulgaria, and it perspires with a fresh style to it); Very good and quality artwork; Great ActionRPG gameplay (though leaning to the hack-n-slash genre, without skill trees); Very good mechanics (combine items, etc); Good narrative arc (a bit bland but the truth is I want to play a game, not watch a movie, so this suits perfect); .. there's nothing bad I can say about it. It is not as good as Torchlight II but it leans more on the hack-n-slash genre of game so not entirely comparable, but oh yeah, does this game kick but! To run this game on Linux I had to hack a bit, by installing 32b versions of some libraries and create a different start-up script. But with the help of Gog's support I got through. Highly recommend it.