Hellgate: London

"Great idea, careless execution."

Hellgate: London seems to be, at first, a great game. It reminds me of Diablo 2 in a way but with better graphics and combat. I've always been a fan of Diablo 2 and games of a similar nature so I decided to buy Hellgate: London. The first thing which happened was I saw a loading screen for 5 minutes. I watched the cinematic, which, by the way, is great: long, great graphics, thrilling and very story-oriented.

After that you get shown the menu. Click to start a Single-Player Game and you get shown the loading screen for another 5 minutes (and that's not exaggeration nor computer failure; the computer that I used it on was in no way slow). I sit there watching the screen for a few minutes and I get to character creation. This is a very nice part of the game, it has good classes, looks, abilities, etc., etc. Another nifty feature they give you is you can select your height, bulk, face, hair and skin; most of it is all part of the norm for games but bulk and height isn't always.

The first quest you do is fun and the game up till this point is great. However, a bit later in the game it turns into nothing more than a burden. To describe this best I'll tell you my computer specs and what happens when a monster dies.

I was running this on a GeForce 8800GTS, 1.5GB RAM, AMD 3800+ Dual Core. Perhaps not the best but certainly not bad. When you kill a monster you see about 50 particles of blood pop out and another 50 particles of some weird purple electricity. This causes extreme lag, especially when you fight in groups. This is where the game really bogs down. Even when I set everything to lowest I get horrible, horrible, terrible lag whenever I kill two or more creeps at a time. When I say lag I mean about 3FPS (frames-per-second) or so. I get a better frame rate playing Crysis than Hellgate: London! This is entirely attributed to the fact that the creators of the game were, frankly, careless in how people with mediocre computers could run it. This means 3FPS on absolute lowest settings, resolution 1280x1024.

I only ran into this when there were more creeps, after a few hours of game-play. The blood effects are some of the worst I've seen, especially in a modern game. It seems like a bunch of crimson spheres are randomly coming out of a zombie. The story starts to become monotonous: fight demons, make it to a Station (something like a safe point), fight demons, fight a boss, make it to the next station, fight demons, boss, station, etc.

Even more bugs for Vista users, while on the back it says Vista compatible, Hellgate switches to Vista Basic view when you run it. With more bugs, when I ran it the first time I had to get a special Windows update because of some weird bug which I had with no other games. The small things in the game, lag, monotony in story, these Vista bugs...these things add up to make the game annoying.

The game does, however, have a saving grace. This is the combat system. I haven't had so much fun with a combat system in ages. It's all real time and you can combine attacks, use abilities and, depending on your class, wield some very awesome weapons. It mixes a modern sort of gun-slinger style with good old sword n' shield. To make a summary, the game ranks like this:

Graphics: 6/10.
As I ranted about before, while the graphics is quite eye-catching they did a terrible job in making too many particles which cause lag. The blood is also quite a shame.

Story: 6/10.
Nothing too special but nothing to slander. The story is rather exciting and is executed very nicely. A good quest system, hundreds of side-quests and a good main-quest, good characters to play into the story...overall, Hellgate ranks nicely in story, but looses out when it gets to the point where you realize that all you're doing is fight, get to station, fight, get to station, etc.

Game-play: 8/10.
While the combat is good it takes a typical RPG type of game-play which is rather unoriginal. It's not a game which you can play for hours on end.

Sound: 5/10.
I can't stand the sound track of this game. I turned it off after playing just a few minutes. Voice acting is ok, I couldn't find fault with it.

Overall: 6/10. It would've gotten a much higher rank if the creators had cared enough to think of lag and low FPS.

This is a great game if you've got a monster for a computer, if not it'll just make you tear your hair out (literally). Even with very close to matching recommended requirements the game lags on low settings. This is really the most annoying thing about the game.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/03/08

Game Release: Hellgate: London (US, 10/31/07)