My understanding is that this ID version only contains the prologue and some side quests. Hence the low score, but it looks promising enough to get at least 4* at release. Its kinda like Wiz 8 in space, but no open environments, its like you have a hub, where you get jobs from a board, click on a supply shop and you get an interface to buy/sell, or a doctor for healage or reset AP. The dungeons are very repetitive so far. The main things are combat , choices and humour. Combat is kinda like DnD ability wheel like TOEE, you click on a target and choose the ability you wish to use on it from a wheel of abilities. Ite a decent nough system tbh. Choices. Yeah they are significant, you are always pissing off some faction, doing the right thing will piss off the "bad guys" but may open up unforseen missions with the good guys. Humour, very self referencing ("Back when I was younger, we used to have to draw our own maps!"), laid back but not in your face, nice classy and low key. You choose your main character from a set of classes, your allies are mercenaries that you hire in the main hub, they will level yp and you get to assign their AP as well as yours. They are interactive outside of combat, insofar as they will offer opinions on choices you receive and make, they tend to have a bit of quirk about them, like Thrasher a robot will go nuts if you use a certain Chaos ability too often.
I see alot of people mention Van Helsing and while there is a mild similarity with the lettle bit of steampunk imagry, there is absolutely no comparison with gameplay this game actually fun to play, Armed with a choice of weapons (Sword/Hammer/Scythe/Shotgun and Rapier), you can wield two at a time as you wade through enemies and augment them with magical powers and increase your stats with Destiny cards which can be changed at will (which means you are not locked into a skill tree). The combat controls are sublimely responsive, best controls I have used in a game like this ever! As you progress through the story and enter dungeons (which each have their own unique sets of challenges and secrets), you will have a really fun experience, I highly recommend it! Oh yeah...coming soon .... Motorhead DLC....shhh dont tell anyone...
Its a decent story but the mechanics are a pita, The camera is really crap at times. Combat is quite slow and the skills can be quite confusing when you are trying to build a character. The map only shows your immediate surroundings which is kinda pointless. The spell choices are quite lacklustre, I have a fire spell that can only be activated to drop on your head with an aoe that damages you as well as the enemies. Highlighting objects/people is annoying, you have to walk up right beside every box to see if it can be highlighted to be opened, you have to walk up quite close to every NP character to see if they have a quest. The city of Lenele is quite huge and bland making quest solving a complete and utter chore, trying to find characters and places is just horrendous. The map cannot be annotated, so even on return journeys to hand in quests, it becomes a huge needle in the haystack game. The quest marker over peoples heads, is the same for people with quests or NPC's with just flavour dialogue and even after the quest is solved, they still retain these markers over their heads causing a lot of confusion and time wasting. Some quest directions are quite misleading also a lot of quests close off after certain game progression. On saying that, it does have a decent story if you can persevere with the mechanics. Price can be subjective I know, but, even at 5.99 this game is over priced.
