Hellgate London Hands-On

Conclusion

Hellgate London uses the London Underground as its conceit to shuttle players to various locations in the game with stations at their hub where you can store inventory items that you want to keep but not on your person along with trading and purchasing new items from merchants. You can even destroy items you don't want and turn them into their raw materials that can later be used to make new items via the in-game crafting system. There are a boatload of items to buy, sell, trade and acquire in the game from high tech weapons to amour to Hellgate London's version of money.

So what's playing the game like so far in the current beta? At the moment its about what you would would expect from the makers of the Diable games. Players enter into zones after going through a portal (with some loading time) and see usually a ton of enemies on screen at one time, from human zombies that charge at you to rat like creatures that jump up high to attack you from above to imps that fire both magical and high tech weapons. At times you cross over into the demon's dimension (and that's actually rather seemless with no load times) which is even worse that London's destruction with red skies and gothic architecture. There's no doubt that the game's art design is first rate with some pretty amazing looking creatures to look at and fight. Some creatures have a mystical shield that you have to break through in order to kill them. However the AI for Hellgate London's creatures is mixed with many just charging in without thinking. One time while fighting a mini-boss in the beta we cornered him and was able to keep firing at him while the beast just stood there, with no attacks or movement. Ouch. If you die (and you will likely die a lot in the game) you have three choices; go back to the Underground Station hub; reappear at the state of the level as a ghost and move to where you died last to be resurrected or pay up some money to be restored to life right where you died.

Hellgate London Hands-On [ @ 1680 x 1050 ] > View Full-Size in another window.

The game's level design can be rather repetitive at times. Sometimes you feel like you never want to see yet another burnt out London city scape ever again. There is some variety in the visuals at time but you will be seeing some of the same locations over and over again. Graphically the game will support both DirectX9 and DirectX10 and both versions have some impressive effects, from weapons and spell fire to water effects. However the game is still in beta which means we encountered more than one desktop crashing incident as well as some issues with framerate and performance. With the game coming out on Oct. 31 we hope Hellgate London's dev team will be able to get most of the kinks out of the code before it ships to stores.

While you can play the game by yourself Hellgate London, like the Diablo games, supports online multiplayer and that means you can gather parties at the game's station hubs to take on the quests and gain more loot more quickly. Much has been written about how the game will still be able to be played online for free but will have an optional $9.95 per month component that will add new content and features to the game right off the bat, along with periodic content updates in the coming months. It remains to be seen if that extra fee will be worth taking up.

As we said our time with the Hellgate London beta has been a mixed experience. The game itself is still buggy, some of the locations can blend in with each other and the AI of some of the monsters is suspect at this stage. However there's no denying that the pull of "just one more level" or "just one more quest" is still there in the game even with all of its pre-release issues. Hellgate London has a ton of options and lots of things to do and most importantly it's fun to play which is of course what all good games are supposed to be. We think that Diablo players or PC gamers looking for an entertaining experience still have a lot to look forward to in the game and we hope that the final version meets our rather high expectations.