Neocore Games joins the home console line-up with the full version of the 1st Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing game, with all it’s DLC. The action-paced RPG featuring Van Helsing and Lady Katarina offers a bunch of variable and dangerous mobs, vast zones to explore and discover secrets, an interesting plot and challenging difficulties.

The game has been worked around the full potential of the PS4 and the PS4 Pro, featuring outstanding framerates and improved visuals. The game feels very fluid for the most part, as it did started staggering in very few zones with a bunch of enemies but still quite manageable. Overall the game is simply entertaining and very enjoyable for fans of this genre.

Going deeper on the mechanics, Neocore really loves to give their games a really in-depth character development, perfect for an RPG, but there is just a vast variety of options; leveling up gives you points for general stats, same goes for Lady Katarina, you get points to unlock new abilities and skills, and defeating world bosses gives you reputation to unlock passive perks buffs. Even though at first the UI may seem very vast, you get used to it and will build your character however you want, and eventually find the dedicated NPCs that can respec your points (and for Lady Katarina as well).

The world of Van Helsing is dark, features campaign objectives and side missions, but one of the most entertaining things it offers are incidental encounters. You found a peculiar looking NPC in your adventures? Careful, if you choose a specific conversation option you might trigger him and fight a mini-boss. You found a pond and for some reason want to taste the water? Careful, your resistance stats may be affected for the rest of the game. All these small surprises are quite funny and give the game a lot of character.

Even though you feel like it’s just you and Lady Katarina against the world, (well…pretty much), the game rewards you very fairly with drops. The game works around equipment and you can choose between going range or melee (or both depending on your situation). Better weapons and armor is very intuitive to equip and inventory management is all right for the most part, especially when you can give your stuff to your companion and send her to sell them in town. If you’re a player who loots EVERYTHING, currency shouldn’t be a problem. However it is recommended to not exactly buy weapons and armor from merchants as you get a bunch of loot from enemies, but save the gold for upgrades and enchantments.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Extended Edition is a very nice opener to the 3 part series, which would have been even better if the 3 games were released on the PS4 as one big game, but I suppose it’s better to pace these out as each one is decently long on it’s own. As for languages, the game is localized for English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portugese, Czech, Hungarian and Russian languages (additionally Japanese for EU and JP versions).