Hellgate: London Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on November 15th, 2007

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You've given me moments of exhilarating sword-swinging and spell-slinging, perched at the verge of death but for a quickly quaffed antitoxin or a nick-of-time healing aura, helpfully suggested via context-sensitive Shift and Control keys. But for every minute of this, I had three minutes of postcrash rebooting past your seven (7!) splash screens, 10 minutes of slogging through an area I've already seen a hundred times before, and 12 minutes of sorting through the confetti mosaic that is your inventory screen. I admit I enjoyed the obtuse calculus of trying to figure out how to best dress my paper doll and mod my weapons, but why so user-hostile, Hellgate?

And this is the world you've created? Failed attempts at Monty Python-esque humor next to the leaden hell-on-Earth angst? Cut-scenes of nothing but a book? It's enough to make a guy pine for Generic Fantasy World No. 117. And the oppressive sameness of your levels! Does one tunnel turning right differ in any meaningful way from the same tunnel turning left? Why must you tease me with great English names like Moorgate, Puddle Dock, and Fenchurch when you're not going to do anything with them? We both know you're going to reuse the same monsters, but do you have to fling them around so carelessly? And did you think taking time out for those special missions was a good idea? A superficial RTS session? A tedious turret shootout? A puzzle-based boss battle? It's a slap in the face at the very end when you demonstrate some cool PVP capture-the-flag variations -- minus the PVP.

All in all, Hellgate is a success in the more revolutionary areas of its gameplay, though more attention could have been paid to the typical action RPG elements that seem to have been taken for granted. There's a lot to this game, and hardcore players will enjoy sinking their teeth into something with so much meat, but casual gamers won't have anywhere near enough patience to milk the fun elements from the gameplay. The story's not over until we see how the integral replay aspects pan out, and initial reactions suggest they could go either way.

In the end, Hellgate: London is not quite a trip into Hell, nor is it a first-person Diablo, as was so often touted during the game's development. Really, coming out at a time when there are so many high quality titles available for both the PC and consoles, something this half-hearted doesn't quite cut it. Give it a try if you love the minutiae of levelling up, managing inventory and allocating skill points. Everyone else would be better off reloading Diablo II.

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