Genre : Action
Publisher: Eidos
Developer: IO Interactive
Release Date: April 20, 2004

Since the video game industry’s birth and especially prominent starting in the NES-era, movie-to-game conversions have been an accepted practice. It’s a good idea on the publisher’s part; they can basically toss a small development team together to create a simplistic, cookie-cutter game and slap a recognizable license on top of it – it’s bound to sell a fair number of copies to unsuspecting consumers no matter how bad the game may be. Some games, especially in recent times – most notably The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay – hope to change that, and actually offer a deep, involving game experience. Unfortunately, the majority of these sort of games are still largely crap, and more often than not, the handheld versions of such games are even worse.

It’s no surprise then, that being a big budget action flick, Van Helsing has received both console and Game Boy Advance video game adaptations. It’s also no surprise that, at least in the case of the GBA version, the game is more or less worthy of being flushed down a toilet.

Van Helsing is your typical action game, in this case mostly viewed from an isometric perspective, similar to the Lord of the Rings games on GBA. You go around a number of levels, kicking ass and taking names. There’s a story here that closely follows the film, but unless blurry pixelated characters and poor dialogue represent good cinema, you probably won’t be too interested.

The gameplay, or lack thereof, would perhaps be exciting if you had been in a coma since the 70’s and haven’t seen a video game since the Pong days. As Van Helsing, you make the phrase “button mashing” seem like an understatement as you fight off hoardes of enemies out to crush your bones. Your arsenal consists of five weapons: your pistol, some small swords, a grappling hook, a crossbow, and later, an electricity-spewing gun. None of them are particularly useful, although the grappling hook doubles as a tool that lets you reach higher ledges and platforms.

As you go from room to room, you’ll occasionally have to hunt down four red artifacts that increase the size of your maximum health meter. It’s not optional to get these, most of the time, so you’ll have some “fun” playing hide and seek with the hidden trinkets. In fact, the first area of the game requires you to look for four of them, and then throws you right into a boss fight. You’ll also have to destroy a certain number of baddies before you continue in other areas, and every now and then a few mini-bosses will show up that require their extinguishing.

The enemies are unfortunately very generic fare. You’ll encounter a legion of skeletons exactly like the ones you fought in every level before, making up, at best guess, at least half of the total enemies in the game. You’ll encounter a few others with new tricks up their sleeve (like annoying homing missiles that seem nigh-impossible to avoid at first), but once you understand their patterns, none of them pose a real challenge. The bosses are moderately interesting, being gigantic versions of the classic monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. The boss battles may be the shining point of the game, as they’re the only ones that really ask you to do anything more than wildly swing your blades and fire your amminution.

Even firing ammunition is made difficult, though. The game doesn’t really have any lock-on system, and you can’t seem to walk backwards, or for that matter shoot in any direction other than the one you’re facing. This makes some battles frustrating, as you’re constantly having to run across the room just to have enough space to turn around and fire a few shots before you’re hit by a projectile or the enemy itself.

The graphics in the game aren’t horrendous, but they aren’t great either. The biggest problem is that the game uses such a tiny color palette that it becomes hard to differenciate things from other things in the environment. Sometimes this makes enemies appear camoflagued; other times you won’t be able to tell the branches of a tree from the dirt path leading into the next screen. Character sprites aren’t really all that exciting, and although animated adequately, the animation is really little more than the absolute minimum needed to get the point across. The game isn’t technically impressive, and artistically, it’s just plain. As you’ll be seeing about a million of the same enemies, the only characters proving interesting are the bosses. Environments are very generic looking and feeling as a whole. Everything is merely decent.

The sound isn’t awful either, but it won’t win any awards. The soundtrack is not bad but gets quite tiresome and lacks variety. Sound effects consist of gunshots, sword swishes, and the occasional screech from a nearby demon. For better or worse, there are no voice-overs in the game; all of the dialogue is presented via text. Overall, the sound doesn’t really enhance or detract any more from the game.

Van Helsing suffers from yet another case of movie-to-game syndrome. It’s obviously slapped together for a quick buck, but it isn’t worth yours. With poor gameplay and underpar production values, you won’t be seeing this title praised by anyone. There may be worse games on the GBA, but there are also many, many better games. Van Helsing is quite simply not worth your time.

Score : 2.5/10