Hellgate: London Review
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The most disappointing of all has got to be the multiplayer, which is far less enjoyable and far more frustrating than it needs to be. Right off the bat, annoyance number one, I can't bring my single player characters into multiplayer I've got to start out with a new one from the ground up. Who's the genius who decided that? So I have to make a new player, and I start playing the multiplayer game right where I started playing the single player game alone and it's not until I get to the first (station) that I can meet up with other players. The whole station is in fact like a single's bar, with characters standing around looking to join parties or maybe they're already part of a party as near as I can tell it is impossible to tell which. You've got to just walk around asking people and see who accepts and who declines, and it can be crowded, and hard to separate out all the people jammed together. In Titan Quest you would just join a game online, and the people there could instantly make you part of their party and portal you to them no matter where on the map they are. In H:L, we've got to meet in the station. Then, and this has to be the worst bit, we set out on an adventure, only because we're all at different points in the adventure, some of the members of the party have their path blocked and can't travel with us. This too there was no way to know until we tried to travel together. Ninety seconds into gaming and our party is fractured, and as near as I can tell, short of cutting the lagging players out or traveling back and going through the early portions of the adventure with them, there's no way to correct it. In TQ you would sometimes adventure with guys way past your level and get killed repeatedly for it, but at least the game would let you do it without blocking you. After more than 30 minutes of trying to put a party together, recruiting more than a half a dozen players only to lose them here and there, I ended up with only me and one other guy adventuring together.
A lot of what worked in TQ, because it was somewhat new back then, doesn't work so well now. The scenery is dull and repetitious, and the monsters are slow and stupid, coming at you a few at a time to be dispatched easily when a serious bull rush might actually cause you some trouble. Getting a party together for multiplayer is awkward and takes far more time than it should, and even then individual party members are often lost or cut off from the rest of their party without an easy means of correcting the problem. Between the been there/done that overall flavor of the game and the niggling UI and gameplay doldrums, I'd have to say I'm dissatisfied with my trip through the Hellgate.
