GB Feature: Victor Vran Review
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Haemimont Games' Victor Vran is the subject of our latest action RPG hybrid review, providing our take on the Bulgarian developer's most recent effort. As usual, we'll start you off with a couple of paragraphs from the critique:
But probably the most interesting type of equipment in the game is the destiny card. As you gain levels, you eventually unlock five destiny card slots and 20 destiny points. Each card has a point cost and some sort of passive bonus that it gives you. Some cards are standard, like The Vampire (which gives health steal), The Moon (which causes an explosion when you deliver a critical hit), and Strength (which increases your critical chance), but others are unique, usually one for each weapon type. There are also "divine" and "wicked" prefixes for the cards, which give extra bonuses, and wildcards, which give bonuses based on how many cards you have equipped. I liked the destiny cards. They're a fun optimization problem to try and solve.
In total, characters can equip one outfit, two weapons, two consumables (potions or bombs), two demon powers, two weapons, and 5 (or 6 with the right outfit) destiny cards. That's not a lot of items, but everything you use can be upgraded in some way through transmutation, which allows you to combine items together. There are lots of recipes for this, and in general they require you to find lots of high-quality items, which in turn requires lots of grinding. Grinding is par for the course for most action RPGs. The problem with the grinding here is that there came a point when I no longer cared what the equipment was -- there wasn't any way anything I found was going to be better than what I had -- I only cared if the item was usable in a transmutation recipe. And so it's grinding that's more boring than usual.
