A review of Hellgate London

What an odd game Hellgate is. One the one hand I am terribly dissapointed. On the other hand...I can't stop playing it. I am playing as a marksman. I shall begin with the Pro's.

It has all the things which made Diablo great. A wealth of cool items and awsome stuff you can do with them. You can modify them, enchant them break them down, build them up, level your guns...the list goes on and on. And this is great fun. For a RPG freak like me, I like to be able to maniputlate my character and his gear. You can run and gun like no-bodies buisness. Wandering around an old Tube station and shooting stuff with one eye and watching tv with the other is a great way to kill a few hours. It has the undeniable "much better than doing nothing" quality and so for those of us who have to be doing something with their hands at all times, it works well. However...the cons are pounding on the door and they want in...

So this is what I didnt like.

1) Graphics. I expect better. Much better. People were being nice comparing it to HL2. Alex is much more animated that the "wa wa" speach of the dummies in this game. The monsters are fairly repetitave and once you have seem one zombie you have seen em all. I tak it back. There is female zombie, skinless zombie and fat guy zombie. Now you have seen them all. Various different kinds o demons but they are in such great numbers that the initial "hey, thats neat lookin..." quickly becomes "oh look, another one of...". The streets are a bit square lookin, rough edges are hidden by iffy art work...I might say the Graphics are comperable to Doom 3. Which was awsome in the day but does not cut it anymore. Besides, I am being nice now. I think Doom has better graphics. Which is unacceptable, especially for a game that was supposed to be of such high caliber. People will buy crap but if they are expecting to diamonds and you try to sell em crap, they are going to notice...and be displeased.

2) GET SOME VOICE ACTORS! For you main quests at least! jeeze! I feel jipped every time I have to read through a long quest description. Now for the secondary quests...meh...fine, I've played enough WOW, I can deal, I'll say ok, just text with some (fairly odd) NPC one liners. But for the main quest line, there should have been speech! It should have pulled me in, told me about the perils of hell on earth. It felt like they meant to but ran out of time or something and so slapped the script into the game and made the players read it for themselves. One the whole it takes away from my immersion in the game, the thing that you must keep.

3) Scene variety! Oh look another tunnel. yay. Now I am outside in an idendicle street. yay...with 10 identicle zombies attacking me. yay. I mean really! I know they were trying to make London, hell, as a former occupant of London myself, I was looking foward to navigating the streets, but Hell should have some variety. It dosen't. Blah.

4) Why I will never ever subscribe: In WOW when you cancel your subscribtion, your character goes on the back burner. If at some time you wish to play again, you just re-install, re-enroll and poof, your beloved level 70 is back complete with all her gear looking as ravishing as ever before. If you cancel your subscription to Hellgate, all your gear disapears. Your level 50 kung fu blade master vanishes and you have to start again at the begining. This is a criminal flaw in the buisness plan for Hellgate. You WANT US TO COME BACK!!! So Now I will never give them more of my hard earned money and consiquently, never really get involved online.

On the whole, I cannot tell a lie. The game is fun. I am still playing the single player offline version and will probably finish the game once...unless Age of Conan come out first. But it makes me sad. This game should have been more, it promised to be more! It s the spiritual sucessor to the Diablo Throne and it is a poor heir indeed. We wanted glory and got the frog prince. The game felt unfinished and poorly quality controlled. Good ideas left incomplete. It's like they sold this game to the lowest bidder. A great game made of the cheapest parts available. Makes for a cheap game. If you like killin stuff and robbing their bodies (which I do), this game has the fun. Lots of stuff to steal, lots of things to kill. If you want more, you want depth and story and voice acting and pretty varied scenes? Get Crysis or The Orange Box or Oblivion or WOW. OR Titan Quest, the REAL new Diablo.

Hellgate dropped the ball. COuld have been a masterpiece. Ended up being a time filler until Guitar Hero 3 or Conan. So Sad..

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