Victor Vran: Overkill Edition (PlayStation 4) Review

Victor Vran: Overkill Edition stars Victor Vran, demon hunter extraordinaire, who happens to have some demon blood in him and is no relation to anyone in Devil May Cry. It plays like a very polished Diablo game, with a distant overhead point of view with fluid and responsive controls. Unlike similar games of this ilk, like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Victor Vran is an action-RPG that is not centred on classes, and instead chooses to give Victor a very specialized set of actions, like dodge rolling and jumping (with wall jumping!), and more reliance on melee action.

The control and overall action in Victor Vran is top notch. It is really surprising how much polish is in the combat, although the dodge roll could use more invincibility frames and Victor has a useless ground pound. Each of the various weapon classes, like the swords, hammers, scythes and various fire arms, all have their distinct ability set, and since there are a ton of modifiers, expect to seldom rely on a single weapon.

After a few level-ups, Victor will even be able to switch between two weapons on the fly, although it really should have been an ability from the start. Other ways that Victor Vran allows customisation the protagonist is the various tarot cards that offer a multitude of perks, like vampiric healing or an off-chance of releasing a fireball attack based on enemy health, although it is unfortunate that these can't be stacked. There are also a few spells that can be equipped, and at a certain level, up to two can be carried, which are activated via the left and right triggers.

Since Victor is a very combat centred character, expect about 70% of the game to be hacking and slashing seemingly endless hordes of monsters. The other 29% of the game is backtracking through emptied maps, looking for items or secrets that might have been missed, and the last remaining percentage is spent reading character dialogue in the hubs. Victor Vran is not much of an RPG and does not have much adventuring or meaningful character interactions at all. In many ways, it has a lot in common with the arcade game Gauntlet Legends, since so much of this game is focused on traversing huge maps and killing anything and everything that moves and pillaging for loot. This really is the weakness of this game, since the action may be competent, but it is far from being deep that it needs some more substance to the generic world instead of constant fighting. It even has a four-player co-op mode (online only) to further draw comparisons to the arcade forefather.

Victor Vran's levels are all connected via a map screen, and every location has an assortment of challenges to complete, which really do help mix up the monotony of the constant fighting. Many of the challenges are reasonable, like kill X amount of (insert monster type here) with a specified weapon, or to not use a health potion. Other times there will be a challenge, like to not get hit once, which is far from reasonable given the lack of i-frames for the dodge roll and how Victor will likely be staring down an ocean of skeleton pyromancers all hurling homing fireballs at him. This is where the developer's sense of humour shines, not in making tired "arrow in the knee" references.

Victor Vran: Overkill Edition does indeed go overkill with its content. Included is Motörhead: Through the Ages, the ode to heavy metal and the late Lemmy Kilmister, and Fractured Worlds, which is the procedurally generated content meant for high level builds. With these new locales expect more of the same for better and for worse. Motörhead: Through the Ages creates an impression early on that the game is going to get wacky, with the outlandish World War II setting and the bad guy being basically Hitler, while the background music blares classic Motörhead tunes. It adds new weapons, like the electric guitars, and new enemies, but the real disappointing reality of this is just how plain everything is. It's just more hacking and slashing with even more lame jokes... Although hearing Lloyd Kaufman speak Lemmy's words is bittersweet, it kind of makes the experience feel kind of sad, since these two men in real life were very close friends.