Hellgate: London Review
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The Engine The engine for Hellgate: London is pretty slick, and it helps to make up for the unfortunate campaign. For starters, everything looks really good, from the huge variety of monsters to the various weapon effects (including a fairly cool representation of the shield surrounding your character) to the war-torn London locales. There are even some nice touches, like when you blow an arm or the head off a zombie, and it still shambles towards you, or when you encounter these strange floating creatures, and they damage you by teleporting through you.
The balance is also pretty good. There are lots of different monsters with lots of different attacks, and the maps and their contents are random, which means that some parts of the game are going to be easier or more difficult than others depending on the character that you're playing or the gear that you're wearing, but I never found the combat as a whole to be too easy or too difficult. It managed to maintain a happy medium, and I was able to get lost in the game from time to time, running around with my Marksman machine gunning everything in sight.
That being said, since the campaign is such a dog, I suspect that Hellgate: London works better as a multiplayer game, where you're just looking for some monsters to kill with your friends rather than a story to experience with them. The game also has some slowdown problems if you enter a room where too many enemies are trying to do too many things (one underground room in particular caused me all sorts of problems, and summoning creatures summon their minions so quickly that they can cause problems, too). No amount of fiddling with the graphics options did anything to fix this issue for me, and I have a decent enough rig. If you have an aging computer, then these sections of the game might be all but unplayable for you.
Conclusion
If a bunch of Blizzard employees move away from Blizzard and create their own developing house, do you still end up with a Blizzard game? Sadly, the answer is no. Hellgate: London is a nice game, but it's far from a great game, and it's easy to spot places where Blizzard would have done things better (even if you're not a fan of Blizzard's games, you have to recognize that they always create a friendly interface and take care of the bells and whistles).
As an example, almost none of the dialogue in the game is voice acted. Blizzard would have hired voice actors -- almost any developer releasing a $50 game would have hired voice actors. That Flagship Studios (or Electronic Arts) decided to pass on this has to be at least a little bit embarrassing for them. You can also look at something like weapon damage, which the game goes out of its way to hide from you. When was the last time you played an action role-playing game and you had no idea how much damage your weapon was doing? Never?
But Hellgate: London is playable and it's immersing, and I had a reasonable amount of fun during my time with it. It also has great graphics, a fun setting, and perhaps the best variety of enemies that I've ever seen in a game, but even so it didn't have enough content to support a 60-hour campaign (I doubt any action role-playing game ever will). My enthusiasm was dragging by the end, and I'm guessing that only those with a high threshold for grinding will really enjoy it. For others, you're probably best off sticking with BioShock or Titan Quest.
