Similar to a Diablo III or Dungeon Siege III or some of these other ARPGs out there, Victor Vran is a game that is ultimately best played with up to three other demon hunters. The blunt reason being that playing single player proves to become pretty tedious and repetitive otherwise, at least in my experience. It’s worth noting that I considered the heralded Diablo III similarly discouraging after several hours of single player. If you’re considering Victor Vran, you’re probably an ARPG fan and are prepared to handle this one way or another, but I just wanted to mention this at the top.
Other than that significant, broad point, much of what Victor Vran brings to the table is good, solid content. The adventure begins with Victor, who is controlled by the player of course, coming into a Victorian-era city that is overrun with demons. The few remaining people have taken retreat into the Queen’s castle and she is determined to see this fight through, no matter the cost. Your business initially lies elsewhere, as you’re searching for an old demon hunter friend, Adrian, and your trail has taken you to this besieged city. The Queen’s court offers a place to store your (numerous) wares, transmutation ability after you reach level 16 (roughly 6 hours in), as well as a place to buy weapons and Destiny Cards, too. The castle acts as a hub with a world map that allows you to fast-travel to the next zone, continuing the story.
Just before entering a zone, or distinct area, a series of challenges are listed on the screen that offer you ways to mix-up your gameplay. Some of these include finding all of the secrets or finding and killing all of the spider nests, others have a time limit or require that you do not use any potions, and so forth. You are notified with an in-game message when you have completed, or failed, these challenges. Completing these gives you extra goodies like XP or Gold, while failure results in nothing more than a message, and you’re welcome to try the challenge again upon re-entering the zone. As you complete these Challenges, the zone is marked with stars, between one and five, indicating how much of it you have done. In addition to challenges, within a few hours you also unlock Hexes which you can apply to these zones to increase their challenge while also giving you some additional percentage of earned XP. By the time the Hex mechanic was introduced, I was starting to already struggle with the pacing of the game (in single player), so I have yet to apply a Hex to a zone.
The biggest wall I ran into with Victor Vran was the repetition and the grind. Some gamers won’t see this the same way I do and that’s great, and if I were playing this co-op (which I was only able to test a limited amount of at the time of this writing), it wouldn’t be as big of a deal. But I ran into the same trouble that I had with Dungeon Siege III years ago, in which I was picking up so many items and weapons, and I had slots for all of them in inventory, it became a nuisance to keep track of them all. There are a bunch of weapons to begin with — swords, rapiers, hammers, scythes, lighting guns, shotguns, and more that I’m probably forgetting. Within all of these, there are a lot of variations and having to stop and examine what you have with what you just got and so forth slows things down significantly. Being able to equip just two weapons at a time — and having to pause the game, go into your inventory to change these out — also breaks up the pacing. At its best, Victor Vran is a really smooth, fast, twenty-plus enemies on screen kind of game, and you can string together some pretty sweet combos between your two weapons. I would have loved for a way to fast-switch between more than just two weapons, and perhaps this does become available as you level up further than I have.
Speaking of leveling up, I am pleased that this happens often and, as I mentioned in my Diablo III (PS4) review, it’s exciting every time it does happen. When you level up, your health refills and you can choose between a variety of bonuses including these special cards that provide passive upgrades. There are a lot of these cards, and they can also be sold and purchased, too. There are not a lot of character-specific customizations you can do (although at the start of the game you choose between three disciplines that are well explained, Hunter, Cavalier, and Vigilante), but I’m perfectly fine with this, and honestly for my level of interest in the genre, I would have preferred a more automated or streamlined approach to inventory and equipment management, too. Because for me, the real fun with Victor Vran and this genre as a whole is the dungeon crawling exploration (trying to find secret areas and just generally enjoying the artwork) and the combat, especially when playing with friends. I loathed getting bogged down in managing all of my junk and constantly wondering as the difficulty ramped up if a) I was using the right weapons for the job and b) if it was really worth playing in single player.
There is certainly a good enough story and a lot of good mechanics to keep one coming back for more, not to mention and impressive presentation. Graphically, there are numerous options you can tweak to suite your system and preferences, and for the first time in any game I have played on my new system I experienced some fps lag in a very crowded dungeon for several seconds (this was running at 2560×1080 on Ultra everything). Being able to smoothly rotate the camera 360 degrees gives you all the perspective you could want, and when you rotate through a wall, the wall sort of instantly melts away so that you can see through it. The graphics are solid overall and very nice to look at, maybe a little bit ‘flimsy’ in some cases with clipping and other minor graphical hiccups, but overall the visuals are great. While on the topic of presentation, I thought Victor’s voice was a bit too generic, but otherwise the audio is good.
Jumping back into general gameplay discussion, the wall-jumping is a little awkward for the first few minutes, but I soon found it to be a nice addition to the gameplay that adds, literally, a cool vertical element to the game and this opens the door to new pathways and secrets with some regularity. I also liked how each weapon class has two special attacks with reasonably short cooldown timers (which can be further shortened with potions and upgrades). If you can use both special attacks on your primary weapon, instantly switch to your secondary, and its special attacks are not tied to whether or not you used your specials on the primary, which gives you a lot of room for nice combo discovery. As another tool in Victor’s arsenal, an overdrive meter fills up as you fight and kill demons (and quickly fades if you stop attacking); once full, you can unleash a demonic power such as raining meteors, a large purple boomerang, a shockwave, and many more.
In short, Victor Vran has more positives than negatives, and the present and future for Victor Vran look pretty darn good.