Van Helsing

Movie tie-ins of the PS2 years were usually judged by how much of the film they could fit onto a disc, and this one makes its trade openly. It is built around Hugh Jackman's monster hunter as the Universal film presented him: a man with a coat, a hat, a blade and a growing pile of gadgets, moving through the film's gothic Europe toward Dracula and his brides.

The structure is a straightforward action game. Levels are mostly linear stretches of corridors, courtyards and ruins, broken up by waves of enemies and the occasional boss. Combat leans on a mix of close-range melee and ranged weapons, so you are expected to switch between them rather than commit to one. That is the sort of idea that sounds richer on the box than it feels in practice, since the enemy variety does not push you to use the full kit with much imagination.

The game follows the film's tone more than its plot, and the plot is not the reason to play. Fans of the movie will recognize the monsters, the settings and the rough sequence of events, and the game borrows the film's overheated, comic-book approach to horror. It does not try for anything quieter or scarier. Everything is loud and moving.

The honest assessment is that it plays like a mid-tier licensed game from a year when that was a crowded category. Controls and camera are serviceable rather than sharp, and repetition sets in before the campaign is over. Still, it has the competent bones of a monster-hunting brawler, and its ambitions are modest enough that it rarely collapses under them.

What keeps it of interest today is as a snapshot of how studios handled blockbuster licenses in 2004: fast turnaround, a recognizable lead, and a design built to be finished in a weekend. It is not a forgotten classic, but it is a fair example of what the format could do when nobody asked for more.