Hellgate: London review (PC)

The spiritual successor to Diablo hits us, but wait… it’s kind of a first person shooter.

Gaming royalty doesn’t just apply to people, but also games. Diablo was one of those games; eliciting a following for its constantly upgrading RPG addictivity, and random dungeon generator to keep things fresh. Hellgate London seems to take the same concepts, mashes them up in a post apocalyptic London based demon story and hopes to keep the charm that the much loved Diablo series once excreted.

The reality of it is that it doesn’t just expand upon the concepts, it seems to plant them straight into a 3D engine, showing off the fact that it can be played as a First Person Shooter, or in third person for a more melee based combat adventure. The game begins (after installation which pleasantly surprised me by letting you set up online within the installer) with a noticeably astounding and quite lengthy FMV intro sequence enthusing the audience and thrusts you straight into the character creation screen. The usual choices of sex, facial hair (perhaps dependant on sex?) and general body size are complimented by the class choice which is where the game gets interesting.


Role Playing, but not as we know it
As with most RPGs, you’ll earn experience, level up, assign ability points to attributes, gain ever more powerful weapons and armour and customise your character with class based skills to help you in battle. Each class is varied enough to sometimes completely change the way of playing. The Marksman puts you straight into first person perspective, and sets you up like a proper shooter, with aiming reticules and circle strafing, but most disconcerting will be the lack of ammo, whereas the Blademaster gives you a classic third person action adventure style for his dual sword wielding action. The perspectives can be changed, but feel the most natural in their default settings. Then there’s the Engineer, building robots to assist him, Guardian, basically a melee tank with heavy attack and defence, Evoker, your classic elemental magic user and the Summoner that seems to be a magic based version of the Engineer, allowing demons to be bent to your will. If that’s your thing.

While the third person action works well and as expected, it was the First Person Shooter aspect to the game that gave me the most intrigue and an attempt to change the genre. The trouble is that it won’t stand up to other shooters on the market, because it isn’t trying to redefine that genre. Battles are generally a case of run in, hit and shoot enemies until they die while healing yourself whenever necessary. Extra skills give an alternative to your tactics, but rarely change the flow of the battle, upgrading your existing skills more often than not.


Mechanics of weaponry
There is a cleverly designed but quite complex (for a newcomer) weapon upgrading system that gives you tech slots in each piece of apparel that you can simply drag and drop upgrades into. Designing your own weapons is possible by breaking down others into their original components and playing around with them cleverly, and when you’re done, why not add a legendary feature to your weapon for that extra final boost.

To reaffirm, there are plenty of ways to customise your weaponry, but they are never really explained, in the manual or in-game and it took me about half way into the game before I really felt like I should see what all of the upgrading was all about, mainly because of the constant dropping of new and more powerful items by your enemies that make it difficult to decide to focus on one weapon for long. Your inventory will fill up very quickly when out on the prowl, and sometimes it is not immediately clear which items will be the best for you to keep hold of, especially since it borrows the ‘Identify’ system from Diablo, demanding you essentially research your plunder before understanding what it can do; It seems to do pretty much the same as Diablo in most cases, merely changing the names of the features for the most part. With the intricately designed items however, sometimes I wish they’d just go back to red and blue potions when trying to find the right item in my inventory.


The concept of the future
At least the plot has a great opening. Setting it up for a dramatic world saving scenario, Hellgate London drawls along with its plot, perhaps trying to make it less linear by offering further side missions that you’ll probably accomplish by concentrating on the main quests (unless it tells you to use an item on an enemy but not how to), and this works fine when you are trying to blitz through the game, but while certain aspects of the story seem very clever and original, the way it is told is confusing, resulting in skipping a lot of the dialogue (unfortunately it’s only in text – but a few select generic lines are uttered by each character) just to find out which door has been unlocked for you to enter next and get to the quest.

Milestones become obvious with the different acts of the story being announced onscreen, but the structure seems to destroy any sense of progression to the game, and until you’re right at the end, you won’t really know where it’s all going, or indeed the style intended for the audience. Some elements seem utterly ridiculous, some are quite amusing, and some make you wonder just how the characters are taking things in the way that they are; although when a certain comedy character is infected by a demon that seems to be gradually taking over his mind and causing his apparent inevitable ‘brain popping’, you can’t help but feel like even the poor chap himself is making light of the situation.


Insert random title here
Having random dungeon creation is claimed by some as an obvious necessity, but with the mere fact that almost all of the locations are of a generic style (perhaps 5 different styles of random levels throughout the game) they seem very plain and repetitive. Random dungeons must be a tricky concept for a 3D world, but having seen the intricate design of many recent games, it seems like a gimmick of a function that sacrifices the quality of design for the hope that playing the same level again with a slightly different layout of where the obligatory rooms and monsters are located will breathe fresh life into the game on each occurrence.

Monster design is generally imaginative, but again with the seemingly random string of enemies in each area, you’ll see most of the basic types early on, allowing for renaming and texturing the same models to represent all new creatures, merely boosting their health and skillset. It seems obvious that enemies must get harder to defeat as your weapons improve, but throughout the game I have found that when you manage to locate that all new super powerful weapon from a hidden cache of clichéd explosive barrels your enemies become mysteriously more powerful, negating any sense of feeling like you are improving once the base type of weapon is found.


Then one will be too difficult
Because of the random level generator, you may come across rare monsters with a randomly chosen attribute that you are unprepared for early in the game. I came across a creature that apparently was ‘regenerating’ and found him impossible to kill early on in the game, as I couldn’t damage him fast enough to stop him from simply healing himself (at least 10 times before you ask) while he had no problem rushing at me to attack. Incidentally, after I came back to the game after a bit of frustration, he had a much weaker power and fell to my assault in seconds.

If you do die, the game seems very forgiving. To resurrect yourself will cost an ever rising amount of Paladium, the game’s currency, or you can come back to the level’s starting point as a ghost for free, coming back to life by finding where you died. Much like Bioshock, this gives you the chance to wear down tricky enemies bit by bit, provided you don’t mind running through the level each death.


Is there a saving grace
The game can be played in online multiplayer too (with an all new character unfortunately), which works well to show how the classes can compliment each other, and it’s free. Unless you decide to subscribe for £6.99 a month, which will give you regular updates with new monsters, weapons, items and quests. A harder difficulty, and more online character slots are available too, but the 3 for the free account shall certainly suffice for my play.

Overall, Hellgate London seems like it began incarnation with a lot of fun and original ideas to bring the genre to a new audience and avoid the obligatory Diablo sequel. The only trouble is that it seems to borrow too much, and doesn’t really deliver in terms of an immersive story, hoping that the gameplay itself will be addictive enough to keep an audience captive and paying extra per month. Choose not to and you probably won’t feel hard done by the game, for the simple reason that it is remarkably addictive. Collecting, levelling and upgrading is still as much fun as it should be, but perhaps the actual feel of how the game plays should have had a little more redesign and a little less rehash.