Hellgate: London

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 2nd November 2007
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The city ain’t pretty…

Now, before I start slipping into my usual review format and describe the gameplay and basic design pros and cons, I want to share my initial reactions to the game. Here I go:

“Ew, that looks awful…” I said, a feeling pretty much echoed by everyone around me. This reaction was swiftly followed by a glimmer of hope though when I saw that the game had DirectX 10 capabilities. That had to make it look better, right?

Kind of. With all the settings on full, the game ends up looking a bit better but it’s still not as good as you might have expected given the level of hype around the game. The animations and textures are especially lacking and there’s a fair number of clipping problems. However, with everything maxed out there are some areas where the game looks good – motion blur for example is pretty well handled.

The game never looks great, but you can get it to a stage where it looks passable and if you’re into this type of hack-and-slash RPG gaming then you’ll be ready to look past the dated graphics and utter lack of bump mapping. Let’s face it, 99 percent of RPG games have never been praised for their graphics.

Hellgate: London Singleplayer Hellgate: London Singleplayer
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At the start of the game you have to do the usual character design bits and run through a brief tutorial. There are six available classes to choose from and they cover the usual bases – two types of mage, a sniper, two swordfighters and an engineer. None of them really stand out as being anything especially interesting and the customisation options are pretty laughable. You get to choose the build, hairstyle and facial texture of your character and that’s about it – though there is an impressive array of camp moustaches which can be dyed purple.

Choosing the right class is pretty important though and is the most game defining thing you can do with your character because it’s impossible for you to later branch out into other skill sets. All the Blademasters skills are based around sword fighting, so don’t expect to be able to specialise in healing spells later on if you end up not liking that class.

The game can be played from either the third person or first person modes, though you can’t play in first person if you’ve got a melee weapon in your hand. Classes can use both types of weapon and can equip things in each hand independently. That’s actually an enormous boon to the game because it means you can really customise your style, wielding a rocket pistol in one hand and a powerful sword in the other, twin swords, a single two-handed weapon or any variation of these.

This brings me unfortunately to the core problems in Hellgate's gameplay; the A.I and the weapons. The weapons themselves aren’t that bad, but they definitely lack power and the firearms never feel very satisfying to use, plus unlimited ammo is just a big no-no, especially when guns don’t even degrade over time or have to reload even. The mix of reflex and RPG elements makes using guns surprisingly interesting though.

Hellgate: London Singleplayer Hellgate: London Singleplayer
Click to enlarge

The A.I. however is more of a problem. NPCs who try to follow you usually end up looping round you and bumping into things even when you stand still and the enemies seem to know only one tactic, called “charge-in-straight-lines”. NPC voice acting is terribly awful too, using over-built British accents to give out one-liners while the actually important dialogue appears as text. Lesson one for developers: Text OR voice.

At one point in the game I found a merchant who behaved especially oddly. I clicked on him and the text popped up as usual, saying “Math is hard. Let’s trade!” at the same time as his voice says (and I quote):

“I envy you so much it hurts…everywhere, but especially in my pants!”

Yes, that sentence did deserve it’s own paragraph didn’t it?

Despite the frustrating NPCs though the game somehow manages to remain appealing. The interface is incredibly polished and easy to use. More importantly, gameplay is fun, like really. It gets dull after a while because the levels are dynamically generated and re-use the same tile sets a lot, which is another way of saying they aren’t custom built or unique in any way a lot of the time, but in medicated doses the game is awesomely enjoyable.

Being able to make and customise your own armour and weapons with certain relics and add-ons is a nice touch too and helps bring a new lease of life to the rather inventive character system.

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