Hellgate: London takes us to the UK’s largest city in 2038, where it has fallen into the hands of demonic forces. The Knights Templar, the only force with the power to combat the hellspawn, saw their numbers diminished after persecution at the hands of King Phillip IV, and lingered in the shadows for years. When it came time to fulfil their task of protecting humanity, the Knights Templar offered their services to the British Military, who laughed them off. Thus London fell to the demons, and the remaining Knights Templar have taken to the London Underground, built by the Freemasons to be demon resistant. As one of the defenders of this post, it’s basically your job to go out and slay as many demons as you can.
Everybody loves a spectre, so why don't you?
Despite the interesting premise and a cool opening cutscene, the rest of Hellgate: London is decidedly light on plot and heavy on the action. It’s not like Diablo II, where the quests you undertook had a direct effect on the story; in Hellgate: London, quests often seem closer to an MMORPG grindfest – fetch this, kill x number of these beasts and so on. It’s really disappointing, and makes you feel like someone decided at some point in the game’s development that they wanted it to be an MMORPG, but didn’t quite get there. The game also uses randomised instances for its levels, which is kind of confusing given the London setting. It’s okay for multiplayer games, but proves to be a bit of an annoyance in single player – particularly in the fetch quests, where an item you could be looking for may end up just being in the first room, without any fighting required to get it. After a couple of hours of grinding through the same monsters, these levels become really monotonous.
Hellgate: London has six different classes from three different factions. The Templars are focused on melee combat with the Blademaster, who is adept at wielding two weapons at a time and abilities focusing on offense, and the Guardian, whose focus is more defensive but is best used for taking on large groups of enemies. The Cabalist makes use of the dark arts and knowledge of demons to get them to do their own bidding. The Evoker class uses more offensive magic abilities with some summoning spells, while the Summoner is the opposite, focusing more on summoning skills with some offensive magic on support. Both Cabalist classes favour ranged weaponry. The final faction is the Hunters, a group focused on using technology to assist in demon busting. The Marksman class favours long distance weaponry, such as sniper rifles, and packs a bunch of weaponry enhancing abilities. The final class, the engineer, can build a variety of robots to assist in combat.
I say we should get a machine gun - we can use it to hunt game, spell things or ring in the New Year
To Hellgate: London’s credit, every class in the game plays very differently. The skill tree for each class is massive, with 27 skills available. Unlike Diablo II, players are encouraged to diversify their skills, rather than focus on pumping points into a few specific skills. The game actually runs in third person mode for melee combat, and first person mode for all ranged weapons. It’s a pretty good setup on paper but the execution isn’t so good. Melee combat feels a bit clumsy, while the guns lack that all important sense of weight. With the exception of the sniper rifles, all of the first person weapons are aim assisted, so there’s no real challenge. There is a pretty big variety of weapons available, and many different creatures to use them on – all of which appear to be very threatening. Hellgate: London also follows the Diablo formula of having a stronger than average enemy (with a specific name) that will hold extra good loot.
Loot and special items are always an important part of action-RPGs on the PC, and Hellgate: London is no different. In addition to finding items strewn all over the game world, Hellgate: London allows for players to forge their own items, upgrading the power of a weapon, adding resistances to armour and that sort of thing. If you find a piece of equipment you don’t want that has useful effects, you can break the item down and use those components to enhance another item of your choice. Inventory management can be a minor annoyance however, as the game lacks any sort of auto sort option, so your character may refuse to pick up an item despite the space being available with minor reorganisation. This is a real pain when you find out that the game is filled with character specific items – you can go questing and only find things that you will never have any use for. It feels like only 20% of the loot you pick up is actually of any use to you.
Hellgate: London’s got a pretty lengthy story mode, so players who opt to go it alone won’t really suffer. Multiplayer on the other hand, while being the way the developer has intended Hellgate: London to be played, is something of a mixed bag. It’s basically the single player game, but you can’t use your single player character in it – you must use a multiplayer specific character. But wait – you only get one per copy of the game unless you cough up $US10 a month. Subscribers get more character slots, a larger inventory, harder difficulty levels, guilds and access to monthly events. The game shows its best parts early on, and there’s an awful lot of repeated content. It’s not really worth the charge when you consider that Hellgate: London is instanced, not fixed, and the game is considerably laggy due to the fact Australian customers must play on North American servers.
The new breed of chavs scumming up the Underground
Artistic design is probably the main strength of Hellgate: London’s presentation, as parts of the game’s in game visual presentation look a little aged. The game has a really strong dystopian atmosphere – you really feel like you’re in a world ruled by scary demons. The designs of the monsters are a real highlight, though the player characters certainly look good too. Well, that’s at least until they move – Hellgate: London has some pretty lousy animation. The environmental designs are pretty cool at first, but within the first 4-5 hours, you’ll have seen all that the game really has to offer in terms of levels. Owners of DirectX 10 compatible cards will be able to pull a lot of extra special effects out of Hellgate: London, but we tested our copy of the game on a DirectX 9 card, which we hear is a lot more stable – but not that much more stable. Hellgate: London’s audio suffers from a lack of attention – the soundtrack isn’t particularly memorable, there’s a distinct lack of “oomph” to the sound effects, and there’s very little voice work.
Hellgate: London showed an awful lot of promise but has really failed to deliver. There’s plenty of content in the game, but it fails to remain interesting beyond the five hour mark. The developer then has the audacity to lock away parts of the multiplayer game with a subscription fee that nobody will think is worthwhile. Melee combat feels clunky, while the first person shooter component just lacks the oomph of other games on the market. The graphics look dated and the audio has been really neglected. Worst of all, the game is really buggy – players who buy the game will have to sit through at least an hour of downloading updates before they can even hop online. Flagship has brought all of the right elements of an RPG to the table, but they’ve failed to put them together in an exciting way. Some RPG fans will cherish Hellgate: London, but the rest of us will look at it with sad eyes and wonder what could have been.
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