Each kind of weapon has two special attacks specific to it, and then coupled with the random traits and boosts you find on your gear you’ll have plenty of factors to consider when arming Victor. You can have two weapons equipped at any time, including swords, scythes, mortars, lightning guns, and magical tomes. Most of your time will be spent killing monsters, of course, and there’s a fair variety of weapons and gear to work with. You’ll also come across plenty of secrets in each area, treasure chests tucked away from the beaten path that often require creative jumps (yes you can jump in an ARPG!) to reach. Those hexes are optional difficulty modifiers you can switch on or off when starting a map, offering a little risk and reward for folks who find the base game too easy. There are five challenges for every map in the game, everything from killing X monsters in Y seconds to finding secrets to beating bosses with certain weapons to fighting with certain hexes active. It’s never a long hike but it’ll take you plenty of time, thanks to all the diversions to be found in each area. There tend to be big hub-ish areas with a handful of side areas and dungeons connecting to them, so most of your quests will simply be to reach whatever dungeon has the next piece of the puzzle. There’s a world map but it’s mainly for warping back to where you were in your quest, each area being a modest but open region to find entrances to new areas in. Instead of a vast, interconnected world or grand journey, Victor operates out of Zagoravia’s royal palace and jumps straight to whatever part of the city he needs to kill things in. This is all going to sound familiar to folks arriving here by way of Van Helsing or Grim Dawn or the other giants of the genre, so I’ll jump right to what’s different. There’s only a few thousand skeletons, spirits, spiders, and other assorted monsters in Victor’s way, and luckily he has no shortage of methods to dispatch them. What begins as a self-serving quest to find a lost friend becomes a battle for the fate of the city and its few survivors, delving deep into the secrets beneath the streets and the connections with the worlds beyond our own. Whatever is happening has claimed the lives of countless monster hunters, and obvious badass Victor Vran has arrived to sort things out. Something is rotten in the state of Zagoravia, an absurdly Transylvanian burg overrun with beasties. And I appreciated that for a time, but eventually came to realize that’s not what I look for in ARPGs at all. In this sense Victor Vran is perhaps the most arcadey game in the ARPG genre, lacking much of the character-building depth in favor of getting you straight to beating the hell out of monsters. A lot of games benefit from the arcade treatment because it makes them more accessible, and jettisons complexity and details for pure fun. “Arcade” is kind of a nebulous term in gaming, but to me it describes something designed to be played in short bursts and simple enough to pick up and run with anytime.
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