...and not a particularly good one in my opinion. Its just the same repetitive stuff over and over. The graphics are very nice (55GB of nice), but it's hard to tell what's going on in the battles as the monsters just kind of blend into each other. It just turns into a mess of werewolf arms, vile temptress wings, and whatever else is in the ball of monsters that is attacking you. You just end up clicking blindly, hoping you win. No strategy needed. Just point and click the ball of flailing monster parts repeatedly and you're on your way to victory. I guess that's why they added the "rage" mechanic. This is a meter that fills up as you kill monsters. You use it to give very specific power-ups to your skills, power-ups that you have to purchase with skill points and then also pay for with rage to use while fighting. This amounts to a form of micro-management of your skills while in the middle of combat. If you had to pay attention to battles this mechanic would be a frustrating distraction. Most of the skill upgrades are rage-based, which means you need to build up rage and also select the power-ups before using a given skill with those upgrades, and this just gives you a one-use bonus to that skill. Lame!! Your sidekick, Katarina the ghost, is a snarky jerk. She is, however, a powerful and versatile ally: a blocker for your ranged character or a support character for your tank. As a combat companion and aid this character is very well done... apart from the ever condescending remarks. The voice acting is mediocre. Not terrible, but definitely not professional. The writing/dialogue is not great either. I haven't played very far into the storyline, so I can't say much about the overall story. But from what I've seen I would characterize it as tongue-in-cheek and uncompelling. The mythos/lore of this game is extremely weak and uncreative. I'm not even really sure why they're calling it Van Helsing. And "Ink"? Come on, seriously?
From the description and reviews I was expecting something like Freelancer. It turns out Starpoint Gemini is more like a two-bit MMO with terrible production value and none of the charm and excitement of Freelanceer. The space scenes and ships are generally well-done and pretty to look at and there's stuff to do like trading, mining and combat. The trading system seems decent, but mining is awkward and unsatisfying, and the combat is even more so. I'm not sure how to describe the combat. Its just... boring. The skill system is a big flop too. Your skill points are spent on making your temporary-power-up-with-a-cooldown style skills better - an uninteresting (to me) mechanic popularly used in cheap MMOs. These are abilities that you have to activate and give you bonuses for a short time (yawn). You also get "perks" which you can spend on passive skills that give you small but permanent bonuses. Those are cool. The voice acting is really really bad. The sound is not great either. I find the music gets annoying pretty quick. If you're into cheap MMO-style games without other players you'll probably like this game. If you love Freelancer and are hoping someone comes out with a next-gen version of it, keep looking. Starpoint Gemini is not it. For me, this has been an utter waste of money. :( If you're considering buying this game, just understand that its not made by a professional game development company with tons of money to put into it. A small development company like this may simply not have the resources to put out a really good space game. I give it two stars only because this game is a good effort by a small developer.
