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Review: Hellgate:London

11.10.07 - 01:45pm

Here we are, the game I have been waiting for since I put down Diablo II in 2004. Hellgate:London is the closest thing I believe we’ll see to a Diablo III unless Blizzard decides to put down the cash cow that World of Warcraft has become. Hellgate:London, launched on October 31st, 2007 contains a decent blend of FPS and RPG elements that complement each other to form a rather addictive albeit repetitive style of gameplay. Flagship Studios launched Hellgate:London to coincide with Halloween but I wonder how the launch would have been had they been given a few more weeks. In addition to this written review there is a video review recorded by yours truly which is a short 11 minutes of me discussing a few attributes of the game. If you’d like to skip to this then click here or scroll to the bottom of the page.

To kick things off lets get a little bit of history. Hellgate:London is based in London, the year is 2038, and Earth has been invaded by all the creepy crawly things that inhabit Hell. All is not lost however, the Knights Templar, an organization that was heavily involved with the Crusades of the 11th and 12 centuries, have created individual safe havens in which the remaining population can safely reside in. From these safe haven’s, which happen to be subway stations in London’s underground, the Knights Templar have launched a campaign to repel the demonic invaders and reclaim London and the world for their own. Couple this backstory of the Knights Templar with some fantastic cutscenes and you have a very believable story, that is if you believe in Hell and all the little tidbits associated with it. Sadly in this scenario Hell isn’t just throwing a party and demanding a Ferrari cake, rather they are out for blood and willing to do all it takes to get it.

You play the role of a character either aligned with or part of the Knights Templar and your goal through the entire storyline is to repel this invasion. You can currently choose between being a Templar, Cabalist, or Hunter, each of which focuses in a separate form of offense. Templars wear thick armor, slash through monsters with huge swords, and generally cause mayhem with their bodies. Cabalists channel the same demonic forces that are invading Earth and use it against the demons to great effect. Hunters have mastered the use of ranged weapons such as assault rifles, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, and various projectors and oddball weapons. Each of these classes contain a sub-class that has a minor degree of specialization but you will quickly notice that there is hardly any specialization between the classes and at the end of the day they all tend to blend together, offering no unique attributes to define each class.

The gameplay itself is rather fastpaced for an RPG with combat reaching speeds seen in medium paced FPS with strategic movement and preparation being key to succeeding in combat. Combat itself is rather fluid between all the classes with the melee classes providing devastating amounts of close-ranged powers while the ranged classes pack a lighter albeit farther reaching punch. As of right now it feels like the melee classes are slightly overpowered compared to the ranged classes as a single guardian can easily clear dozens of zombies in the time it takes a hunter to clear a dozen. Your effectiveness in combat will depend primarily on your equipment and less on the skills of your class as frankly the skills seem to be a second thought rather than a primary focus of the developer.

Each class contains roughly 25 skills and each skill tree contains a rather bland group of skills that for the most part don’t offer anything to get excited about. Often a single skill in a tree will have three different variants with the only difference being either the amount of individuals it affects or the power of the attack. Upgrading skills themselves rarely is worth your time either with each upgrade offering minor increases in effectiveness with the typical upgrade simply lowering the recast delay a few seconds. If anything the skills are one of the largest letdowns within Hellgate:London, for a game that is called the spiritual successor to Diablo II it sure does lack one of the draws of it’s predecessor.

Items and equipment all contain stats and attributes that are completely random and that are influenced by your character level and “luck” rating. This means that there are no status items to spend hours searching for, no sets to collect for massive bonuses, and no reason at all to spend hours farming a boss to acquire a specific item to complete your ensemble of equipment. While this seems to be the goal of FSS, to provide a large replayability value by making everything random, it really hurts the game in the fact that you cannot acquire items that are universally accepted as being pure awesome.

For all the ranting though the item modification system within Hellgate:London is rather phenomenal. You can make a lowly item into a godly item with the investment of some raw materials, in-game coin, and time. You also have the option to craft items however you only get to select the items to craft from a randomly predetermined list. I’d much rather be able to craft my own special gear with my name included in it and some ridiculously crazy stats, even if it required me saving hours and hours worth of loot just to create this item. Speaking of which, in the game you can disassemble all equipment into a variety of raw materials from which you can later upgrade or create items with. This is a rather nice addition to the game as you now have a reason to pick up EVERYTHING and dismantle it.

The questing system itself is a bit of a letdown compared to other MMORPGs but this wasn’t exactly a surprise given that today’s MMO’s have a generic playbook they all seem to draw from. Go get this, go kill that, run over here, talk to this person, you can only do these things so many times before you realize “Wait a second.. I JUST DID THIS!”. Besides the random gopher quests the storyline itself is rather nice and makes me wish that FSS had spent a bit of time like they did with the storyline to create convincing sidequests and stories.

Hellgate:London is being lumped together with all the MMO’s that exist on the market right now but at it’s core it’s more like a singleplayer game ported over to the Internet. Rather than feature a huge persistent world, Hellgate:London features instanced zones for you and your friends meaning you won’t have to fight other players to rush for a boss-mob or unique item but at the same time it isn’t as easy to group up with someone. Grouping in the game isn’t really encouraged in the fact that a single character can blast through the entire game and rarely hit a brick wall. The game plays a lot like Guildwars except the bosses can easily be solo’d and currently there isn’t much in the way of PVP to speak of.

Thankfully FSS has made Hellgate:London free to play however there is a subscription service that’ll unlock future content as FSS releases it. As of right now I can’t suggest getting a subscription for what is essentially a beta product but perhaps once Hellgate:London is a fully featured product it may be worth to pay the $10/month to play the game and get all the features and support.

Visually I’d have to say Hellgate:London is a knockout for it’s genre but compared to upcoming FPS and it looks a bit dated but this is understandable. While I have only played Hellgate in DX9, I hear the DX10 gameplay is remarkably better with great use of fire, shadows, fog, and lighting which doesn’t surprise me considering how excellent FSS uses these effects in DX9. If you play Hellgate:London in the dark and the speakers cranked up I guarantee you’ll jump a few times with monsters sneaking up on you and surprising you. The explosion effects, the dismemberment of the zombies, the environments themselves, the characters and equipment, all in all it’s a rather great experience.

In the video review of this you hear the introduction for the Hellgate:London theme by Sascha Dikiciyan and Cris Velasc. Considering how awesome that sounded I was hoping that FSS would have a killer soundtrack but sadly the soundtrack is rather bland and useless. I suggest firing up iTunes before you load up Hellgate:London and playing through a few playlists, I personally have been slashing zombies to the new Motion City Soundtrack album, highly suggest you do the same.

I don’t know if I can consider this a pro or a con but from what I can tell Hellgate:London doesn’t utilize more than a single-core. The image below looks more like it’s fully utilizing one core and iTunes and MAYBE Hellgate:London is doodling away on the second core. Compared to CPU utilization in Supreme Commander, Hellgate:London doesn’t look like it’s using the 2nd core so don’t rush out to buy a quad just for Hellgate:London, save that for Alan Wake from Microsoft.

Overall Hellgate:London isn’t a bad game. It’s like that kid at school that everyone thinks is weird but once you get past his awkward and strange exterior you really realize he’s quite the fun guy to be around. Hellgate has these same attributes with a decent amount of bugs still left in the game, a few lacking features such as UI adjustments (can’t adjust the chat window, wtf?), and a few promised features still not available, but at it’s core Hellgate:London could be a top tier title and not something to be passed off and shelved. Give FSS 3 to 6 months to work out all the kinks and hopefully take a few suggestions from the community and we might have a winner here, it’s no Diablo II by a longshot but it might be just enough to create a large following once cleaned up. I’d highly suggest going out and grabbing a copy, as it is a rather fun game to play through atleast once but playing online might leave you wanting more. That’s it for now, if you do play Hellgate:London drop me a line and maybe we can group up sometime, always looking for somebody to slay some zombies with.

Final Score: 6/10

Pros

• Fluid Combat
• Unique Item Content
• Addictive Core Content

Cons

• Buggy as Hell
• Rough Around the Edges
• Lack of Skills and Classes

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