hellgate London

Right, now here we have another one of those games that isn’t really sure what it wants to be.

It wants to hang out with online rpgs, but it certainly is in no way or form a MMORPG. It offers no real decent LAN so for parties or a little co op with your friends this isn’t the game. And then all this is based upon a mix of Diablo, PSO and anarchy online.

Gameplay wise it’s not bad, it offers decent controls, pretty range of options and character classes. Although the experience and levelling system is somewhat chaotic.

The story to me was extremely boring and badly told. So much so in fact that after a while I stopped reading the in-game text.
 It says something about this game that you can usually simply click trough all the dialogues and then go and kill whatever it is you are supposed to slaughter.
On some quests you are given an item and that usually means right clicking on said item after killing a marked baddy to do something or other that you won’t see happen.
The most interesting quest I came across was one where I had to equip a special helmet with a lamp built in so I could navigate my character trough an otherwise pitch black level.

Sound wise it’s not bad, but not great either. Whatever happened to writing a decent score and hiring some artist to do a few songs for your game?
The voices are nearly nonexistent. That is to say there is hardly any speech in this game at all. Your character does not speak, NPCs only say some general comment whenever you talk to them which has nothing to do with the actual topic of conversation. The merchants all have some unique phrases but those get old after a while. The cast is however way too small. Here we once again have countless characters using the same voice and quite often the same randomly generated greeting.

I have to say that for a game of this size The lack of proper voiceovers for at the very least the main story quests is just silly. Although I suspect that the high level of profanity might have had something to do with that.
 Even so to go purely test based apart from the few cutscenes makes little sense. And I have to say that those sequences aren’t all that impressive apart from a decent intro.

Graphics are decent although the outside levels do not look realistic. You can half the time look trough buildings, and the whole thing gives a feeling that you’re walking through one of those old school Hollywood sets. You know, where all the buildings are just fronts held up by supports at the back?

Enemies are decent but get a bit boring. They level up as you do, and that means you keep seeing more or less the same monsters in slightly different incarnations. Usually just a bit bigger and harder to kill. There are some original mobs so it isn’t too bad. However, personally I would have been a bit more creative. When it comes to hellspawn, and demons. There is such a large variaty available.

However this game should not have been released yet. I’s horrible. This is a buggy monster straight from the coding hells. The installer is bugged, the launcher has quirks. Trying to update this monster can drive you batty in all new and not so interesting ways.

First you need to download the web installer package. That’s where the trouble begins because at the time I’m typing this only the European server works, sometimes. You can forget about copying the links to these files into your download manager because the update servers do not in fact support resumes on downloads. Quite impressive in a bad way.
 Do not even think this is the end of your troubles. Because after all this hassle you need to run said web installer, and that tries to download the actual patch files from the same dubious, hard to reach, non resume supporting servers.

Even after applying this insanely hard to get patch, hellgate london is still as bugged as can be. Monsters you need to kill to complete quests spawn or warp into walls or floors, quest items are dropped but can’t be picked up. Game stutter and slowdowns even on high end machines