Victor Vran is a stylish isometric, action-RPG that’s recently been released on Steam’s Early Access program.
As a long time user of Steam, I’m not unaware of the issues and stigma attached to Early Access titles. Fortunately, Victor Vran’s vision is clear and aside from a few issues, most of which are due to the game being a work-in-progress, has potential to be the truly great action RPG that many of us crave.
From the get-go it’s clear that Victor Vran is the brain child of dozens of popular titles. While at first Victor Vran appears to be a darker Baldur’s Gate it quickly sets itself apart. Aside from real time aiming, manual attacks, and dodging the combat is reminiscent of League of Legends. at least in the ability hot bar. After a (very) placeholder introduction I was thrown into an intuitive and organic tutorial in which I learned how to attack enemies with my sword, wall jump (Metroid anybody?) and use my “demon” abilities. This all felt mostly natural, with the exception of targeting. The targeting system took a bit to get used to for many reasons. One, the way you target enemies is, by default, completely independent from your movement. This means that you can attack an enemy behind you while having just been running forward; a useful but confusing system. Luckily, there is an option to use mouse movement instead of WASD, making the controls feel even more like League of Legends. Unlike most games, each ability you have, with the exception of your demon powers, is based off of your weapon(s).
So far I have only encountered three weapons; the Sword, Shotgun and Hammer weapons. Hopefully there will be more in the final build of the game, but that has yet to be seen. Each of these are greatly different in attack speed and damage, Oddly enough, the shotgun had seemingly infinite range, which is highly uncharacteristic of a shotgun. In a way, it threw off the balance of the dungeons and enemies as I could just stand 20 feet away and fire off shots. The last big aspect of combat are the demon powers. I’ve mentioned before that these are independent of weapon type, and they seem to be connected to Victor, the dark and mysterious man we play as. They range from meteor strikes to, my personal favorite, dark energy boomerangs.
While the RPG elements like loot and character progression are here, they are fairly rudimentary. There aren’t a ton of complexities or choices to be made. Most of what you can do to Victor is superficial and inter-changeable. Clothing alters defense and overdrive stats and appearance, weapons have basic stat changes but all weapons of the same type (so far) share abilities, and most perks or superpowers are equip-able items. Now this is not a problem, as it puts the focus on the two seemingly core pillars of the game, combat and story. The combat systems I’ve described work, and they work well. Dungeons are setup to essentially provide the player with epic combat scenarios and moments, ramping up from 5 skeletons to 100 in single fight.
Enemies are varied in appearance, abilities and actions, and the real-time combat makes it feel as if you’re playing a hectic hack and slash game, but with some thought. The other core pillar I mentioned before, story, is not a thing I can judge quite yet, mainly because there simply isn’t any in the Early Access build of the game. Placeholders exist in the introduction scenes, and there are parts of the game where the story is purposefully stripped in order to ensure a feature-themed early access and a story-fueled launch. There are hints dropped here and there, and you can tell it will be a dark tale, and it seems like Victor’s connected to Demons somehow, but there’s not much else to go on.
As you may be able to see from the screenshots, there are dedicated options to report bugs and provide feedback, which is a nice feature in an early access title. Besides partially implemented features and placeholders, the only issues I ran into were that of optimization. On my fairly powerful build I ran into a considerable amount of lag, especially when shadows were active.
Victor Vran has the potential to fill the hole that’s been left in many RPG enthusiast’s hearts. The isometric style is engaging, and the combat is actually enjoyable. Where the game goes from here is entirely based on the amount of content and the motivating factors that exist once the story goes live.
