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Review by Telefrog
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Hellgate: London is one of those games that other developers watch with clinical detachment to learn from. It is a tragic lesson in hubris and mismanagement. One can imagine a test question about Hellgate: London in Game Development 101 being worded like this, "How could the critically praised co-developer of Diablo release a highly anticipated action-RPG game in which the player is a warrior fighting against demons from Hell in a post apocalyptic London in a state sorry enough to blow their launch and torpedo any chance of recovery by implementing a two-tiered pricing scheme that pleases no one and hamstrings their efforts to improve the game?"The answer would be, "Please see Hellgate: London and Flagship Studios."The game's story (such as it is) is that gateways to Hell have opened in various spots around the world. These dimensional rifts allow demons to pour out and ravage the Earth bringing humanity close to extinction. The demonic forces in London are battled by Templars which have prepared in secret for this dire event by stocking up on arcane knowledge, weapons, and armor. The player takes the role of one of these Knights and battles their way through a partially destroyed London and various levels of Hell to defeat a particularly nasty demon.The hook of the game is that it's an action-RPG, but unlike Diablo and its ilk, Hellgate: London features guns, as well as swords, in either a first-person view or a third-person "from just behind" camera. This bit of technical wizardry is due to a proprietary engine that Flagship developed which brings us to the first of many gripes. Namely, the engine just isn't ready for primetime. It's clumsy and prone to technical issues. It doesn’t convey the action very well. There’s no sense of solidity to the actors or the environment. To top it off, it’s not even as pretty looking as some games released two years ago!As an action-RPG, gamers shouldn’t expect to get much in the way of a story. Basically, as long as you have the impetus to kill X amount of monsters, most players will be happy in this genre. The way the story is conveyed in this game is complete tripe, however. It’s completely schizophrenic. The opening cinematic of the game features a frantic mission to escort a young girl through London with a very awesome fight between a gun-toting Templar and a huge demon at the entrance to an escape passage. The fight is tense and the urgency conveyed in the girl’s plight is palpable. Then the game starts and every other mission brief includes fart jokes, slapstick, and drunken idiocy while Templar leaders are trying to convey the dire position in which London finds itself. It’s like watching Schindler’s List edited with Benny Hill sketches.The game mechanics such as leveling up, skill progression and loot gathering are serviceable, but even these elemental parts of the experience are hamstrung by the shoddy execution. Skills have very little variance between character templates. (In fact, some parts of the skill trees are copied verbatim.) Many skills are broken or do not work in an intuitive fashion. Loot items have a Byzantine stat requirement system that hampers your character development. Many statistics are hidden from the player’s view making min/max determinations impossible.One of the primary bullet points of the game was that all the environments and enemy groupings would be randomly generated to keep play fresh, but this has turned out to be a liability rather than an advantage. The game uses only a few stock tilesets like sewers, city streets, warehouses, subways and Hell rifts, so be prepared to see a lot of the same areas over and over again. Monsters are repeated to nauseating levels as well. Late in the game, you’ll be seeing the same zombies that you saw in the first level. The term “level grind” has never been more appropriate.
To top off the comedy of errors, Flagship decided to try out a new subscription pricing scheme with Hellgate: London. People that purchased the game could play online and single player for free, but there was an option to get more stuff if they paid $10 a month. Never mind the fact that similar games in the past offered a more robust experience for free all the way through. Flagship was determined to show gamers that their ongoing content would be worth it. Six months later, paying customers have seen little for their money. A Stonehenge content update was released that offered players a new environment outside of the city and a bit of endgame questing, but for the price of another full game (Hellgate: London has been out since October), they’ve gotten the equivalent of a small expansion to a core game that is still woefully incomplete.
Even though the game is being marketied in Asia as a MMORPG experience, don't fool yourself. Since the areas outside of the London Underground hubs are instanced for you and your party, there's no "massive" in the MMO. The closest comparsion would be Guild Wars, except you'd have to subtract the engine stability, content, graphics, popularity, and then tack a monthly fee to play with the big boys onto it.
There is some fun to be had in Hellgate: London to be sure. If you’re just looking for a quick action-RPG fix and don’t mind a bit of bugginess, then this game will fill the void for a week or two until something better comes along. Just be sure to pick it up for cheap somewhere if you do. If you’re looking for MMORPG interactivity and variety, or more than what you can get in Diablo, then you’ll want to stay away.
Crashcart on 04/07/2008
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Telefrog on 04/07/2008
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