Neocore Games has their work cut out for them, entering a very crowded Action RPG market with their upcoming title The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. We got a look at a playable pre-alpha build of the game at E3, and while many of the gameplay mechanics felt very familiar, there are a couple of elements in this one that may make it worth a look later this year.

The story of the game follows the son of the far more famous Van Helsing. The younger Van Helsing is attempting to establish his own legacy as a monster hunter, and his timing is just right, as new terrors are emerging in the night. The game has a very steampunk feel to it, with the monsters who all have strange things grafted onto them and look like the result of science experiments gone horribly awry. Van Helsing himself wears the classic wide-brimmed hat and wields both a sword and a gun in the demo.

The tone looks to be wry and light hearted as well. Van Helsing is accompanied by a ghost named Lady Katerina who is apparently quite critical of the young monster hunter and his flair for the dramatic – he is always willing to strike a pose before slaying his foes.

From a gameplay mechanics perspective, much of this seems quite familiar. You have health and mana, you can map attacks to the left and right mouse button, and you do a lot of killing monsters and taking the stuff the falls out of them. There are a couple of newer things that do look like they have promise, however. There are three skill trees in the game, but each skill appears to power 3 related abilities. Those 3 related abilities are powered by a third consumable resource called Rage, which functions like Health and Mana but is filled up by hitting enemies. Rage fills quickly and can be spent on one of the 3 abilities tied to a skill or attack. For example, we were able to use Rage in the demo to add Crushing Blow to our standard melee attack – this made our very next attack deal more damage than normal. You can mix and match rage to create more powerful attack combos as well. Since this was an early build, there were only a couple of skills we actually got to see, but the concept shows a lot of promise.

Another differentiating feature for Van Helsing involved some of the enemy immunities. The immunities the enemy possessed were not just element based (fire resistant, lightning resistant, etc.), but were also location based. Some of the foes we encountered had "front immunity," for example, making it necessary to maneuver behind them to do damage.

Even though The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing seems unlikely to make huge strides forward in the Action RPG space, some fun new mechanics and a real sense of humor in the setting and dialogue could make this one worth checking out as 2012 progresses, especially if they give it an attractive price point. Neocore Games is looking to release this title on the PC and XBLA in Q4 of this year.