There's some good stuff behind this Hellgate, but it probably should have waited a little while before opening.
"Action-RPG" is kind of a clunky moniker. Often used for Blizzard's classic Diablo series, it describes a game design that cuts out all the so-called "boring" parts of the classic computer RPG structure in order to provide a constant stream of exciting moments. Kill monster! Get treasure! Level up! Repeat with more powerful monsters! Hellgate: London, Flagship Studios' highly anticipated "spiritual sequel" to Diablo, was created with the explicit intent of bringing that formula into the modern era of gaming. In that, the developers have succeeded. There's certainly plenty to recommend in Hellgate: London. It's an endless demon-slaughtering party with fun combat and an addictive (if repetitive) loot system. But problems in design and implementation, and a general lack of polish -- especially in the buggy multiplayer experience -- mean you'll have to work a bit to enjoy the good stuff.
The premise for Hellgate: London is pretty clever. It's 2038 and an ancient prophecy of the Knights Templar has come true: Hell has conquered the Earth and the last pockets of humanity -- the Templar, the magical Cabal and the remains of Earth's elite military forces -- huddle in magically reinforced London Underground stations plotting their eventual counterattack. Unfortunately, that's all most players will ever really understand about Hellgate: London's central conflict. Quest-giving characters in the human resistance are ciphers distinguished only by sex and the armor they're wearing; the missions they give out are generic "kill eight foozles and bring back their heads" exercises, and the actual plot is thinner than the mystical border between Hades and London is supposed to be.
The game's strongest feature is the actual combat. Hellgate: London offers players six different classes and all of them, with one limited exception, offer varied and enjoyable experiences. Play as an Evoker, for example, the game's caster-style class, and be prepared for a cautious life consisting of sneaking forward and sniping from the shadows. The Guardian, on the other hand, offers third-person melee combat similar to an arcade-style beat-em-up while the Marksman comes as close as Hellgate: London gets to a first-person shooter.
The floor plans of most zones in Hellgate: London are randomly generated, an impressive feat given the 3D environment. Zones are only plotted out when a character enters them, so every area offers its own mix of surprises: hidden tunnels, hellrifts, streets, abandoned buildings, treasure chests... Even the entrances and exits will move each time. The downside is that relying on random level design means that monsters and quest objectives will be placed without rhyme or reason. Often multiple quest objectives are placed right next to each other, or important locations will be guarded by the weakest monsters.
These randomized floor plans also preclude any real sense of "place." London is a city rich with history and places with fascinating names like "Cheapside" and "Mansion House." The Hellgate: London version of these places is an endless randomized collection of generic sewers, maintenance tunnels or destroyed streets with eight different copies of the same roofless English pub. The difference is even starker once you've experienced set-piece story battles that take place in places like Piccadilly Circus or the Tower of London; these locales do a great job of creating a feeling that the player is fighting in the ruins of London, but occur too rarely and only make everything else feel bland by comparison.
Dynamically generated loot helps keep Hellgate exciting. There's a thrill that comes from the continual hope that at any moment something really awesome will drop to the ground to replace a weapon or piece of armor the player's been lugging around for two levels. There's also a great system of equipment upgrades and enhancements that ensures that futzing with inventory as new stuff is acquired -- always one of the most fun parts of an RPG -- is almost constant.
The horrible news is that players have to manage seven tons of inventory in the pseudo-Tetris bag o'boxes that ensures they'll be spending way too much time shuffling old items around to make room for new ones. Would an "autosort" button have been too much to ask? And maybe some more storage space?
From a design standpoint, the demons of Hellgate: London aren't the most original depiction of Hellspawn ever created, but they get the job done with a nicely variegated zoology ranging from impish flyers to floating half-women trailing glowing tentacles, skulls plopped onto gorilla-like bodies that shoot explosive spiked balls, razorbacked beasts that leap into combat, a few very impressive boss monsters and much more. Their combat capabilities are equally varied. Demons will crawl at the player and then leap at his or her face, others charge straight into melee combat while still others stand back and snipe or offer protections and buffs to other monsters. True, their AI is mostly of the "run at the player and hit until one of us is dead" variety, but that doesn't really matter with this many creatures flying, flopping and shooting at the player and when their randomized composition makes every battle a brand-new challenge.
Beyond the single-player campaign, Hellgate: London's multiplayer structure is a bit unusual. There's a standard multiplayer component which consists of co-op play through the regular single-player game content. Each of the Underground stations in the single-player game becomes a multiplayer hub where players can meet, hook up for adventures, buy and sell items, trade things back and forth or just hang out showing off their latest piece of loot. Once a player or party enters a mission, it then becomes a private instance just for that group.
This multiplayer structure isn't too dissimilar to Guild Wars, subject to many of the same social issues that plague that game -- mainly that the tiny Tube stations are just too small to display more than a fraction of the player base, reducing the opportunity for casual meetings and making new friends. That said, the combat is fun and traveling, hooking up with party members and trading items back and forth all work fine (although most of folks playing here at GameSpy HQ feel the chat system is a complete mess, and the lack of an auction house is a real downer).
Sadly, nothing says that Hellgate: London was pushed out the door too early better than the buggy state of the game's multiplayer. Since the game was pushed live on October 30, the multiplayer servers have been plagued by registration problems and downtime (which, naturally, results in the official site and forums getting overloaded and crashing). More problematic are a couple of nasty bugs including frequent crashes to desktop, slowdown and lag during combat and a weird display bug that makes all the character models on screen disappear, leaving the player as just a disembodied weapon floating in mid-air. GameSpy editor Fargo ran into a reproducible bug where he'd actually lose one of his weapons every time he was dual-wielding and logged off, which, as bugs go, is an inexplicable gamebreaker.
For anyone who gets truly addicted to Hellgate, there's an option to get a premium subscription -- when the subscription system goes live, that is. As of this writing it hasn't yet kicked in. According to Flagship's marketing materials, a subscription will allow players access to more storage, more character slots, monthly content, harder game modes, new classes and weapons, pets, raids, guild tools, seasonal and themed areas, additional PvP modes, Web rankings and character viewing. To start, however, the subscription will only offer a few of these things, mostly the basics like extra character slots and inventory space, hardly enough to justify the cost of the subscription.
In the end, those who sank hundreds of hours into Diablo and Diablo II or even those looking for a relatively light, enjoyable action RPG will find a lot to enjoy in the 20-hour or so single-player campaign or the free co-op system (once the inevitable series of patches address the bugs). But for those who didn't, the short-lived mindless monster-killing corpse-looting joy just won't be enough to finish the basic story, to say nothing of a monthly subscription. If the development team had poured half the creativity and personality into the setting, character, content or story as they did into the fighting and looting, the game might have become a modern-day classic. Instead, what comes out of this Hellgate often feels a little underwhelming.
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