Hellgate: London

Publisher: EA

Hellgate: London is a bit of an oddity as far as a I’m concerned. It’s an action RPG with hybrid elements which can be played with third or first person perspectives in levels which are dynamically generated and populated with demons and high-tech weaponry - but I wasn't massively worked up about it before the launch.

It’s that last bit which is what makes it an oddity by the way, because normally this type of game is right up my street. Usually when I hear about games with descriptions along these lines I morph from my usual Clark-Kent-alike journalist persona into something altogether more untoward – a hungry supergeek obsessed with the game and nothing else.

With Hellgate: London though, that isn’t what happened and the game has been one which I’ve known about but never really pursued an active interest in.

The reason for my being put-off was, I think, the way that the game was being primarily marketed on the merits of the multiplayer side, which requires a subscription for players to unlock a lot of key bits. Inventory slots and storage, for example.


That said, when the game landed on my desk my interest was re-kindled a little and I found myself getting excited about the game once more - though whether or not that new surge of interest was bought on by the swanky, flame-covered packaging is an issue for another day. Right now, I’m more concerned about whether or not the game can live up to the substantial hype it has managed to build up from everyone else in this new post-WoW world…

Remember the dead

The premise and story for the game is fairly simple, which is something unsurprising when you familiarise yourself with the team behind the game. Hellgate is developed by Flagship Studios, a developer founded by Bill Roper and a few other ex-Blizzard figureheads who worked on games like Diablo.

Like Diablo and Warcraft, Hellgate is a game which doesn’t try to hook players in with a startlingly complex and epic story like some games do. Instead, the focus is on gameplay – but we’ll get to that in a minute.

So, the story is this; DEMONS or, to give you the long version: OMG! DEMONS!

Yep, the world has been taken over by demons who’ve emerged from the titular hellgate underneath London. Personally, I thought the hellgate was in America, but nevermind.


Turns out that this isn’t the first time the demons have tried to take over Earth either and the game references real-life events such as the Crusades and the Great Fire of London as efforts to kill the demons – events which have been cleverly disguised.

The demons are battled by the Knights Templar, a group who have fallen back into fashion ever since the Da Vinci Code unfortunately found its way onto bookshelves globally. The Templar were masters of the arcane and had always fought the demons back when they emerged, but the group is nothing but a small handful of men in modern times.

Although the Templars do their best to reform and battle the menace, they are laughed at by the army and the demons manage to take over the world, starting the process of ‘hell-forming’ it into their idea of paradise. The remaining Templars join up with the now-shattered armies ( who’s laughing now, eh? ) and fuse their abilities to create blessed weapons capable of pushing the demons back. Hopefully.

This is where the player enters the game as a templar novice in one of six available classes, ready to take the fight to the demons and take back the city of London.

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.


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.


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.

Multiplayer is fun!

So far, I’ve been pretty harsh on Hellgate: London. I think that’s for good reason because, compared to other games around at the moment it really doesn’t look that great or do anything new. In my book good games should really try to excel in at least one area.

There is one area where Hellgate does well though – one area where the bad graphics and overall design starts to make sense. That’s in the multiplayer.

The multiplayer side of the game makes everything suddenly seem more tolerable somehow and you start to realise almost immediately how the interface has been made to closely mimic the set-up of games like World of Warcraft. The game suddenly becomes detached from the dungeon romp which is the singleplayer game and suddenly feels a lot more like an MMORPG game.

That, I suppose is the intent. The lack of decent bump mapping and complex textures is now explainable in that it makes the game much more scalable and suitable to that genre. The interface, which has small touches like not pausing the game when you access the inventory, suddenly makes sense because in an MMO game, auto-pauses would be incredibly complex.

One thing to bear in mind though about the online aspect of Hellgate though is that it has two tiers of play. The first tier is available to everyone who owns the game and is pretty much the usual MMORPG game, just set in a demon-filled and more ugly than usual version of London. You run around with other players, completing quests which gradually increase in complexity until the game slips into grind-city without you ever really realising. Nothing bad about that and I’m sure it’s quite good if you’re into that type of thing.


The second tier of the multiplayer game is available only to those who want to pay cash up front on a regular basis. I'm told the fee is around $10 in the US and is £7.99 in the UK. Paying that fee gives you access to a whole load of extra features, like fast-travel options which cut down the number of load sequences you have to go through or inventory slots which let you carry much more stuff.

I’m honestly quite divided on my opinions to this system. On the one hand it’s good because it rewards those who enjoy the game the most, whilst putting money into the hands of the developers and publisher so that more content can be developed later if it all proves popular. On the other hand though, this system ends up dividing the playing field and tilting it in favour of those who just have more money and so on.

I suppose the core question about the premium service is whether or not it’s worth paying for it. My view on the matter is that if you really like the MMO side of the game and find yourself playing it over the singleplayer version then you may want to consider dolling out the moolah for the extra services.

If you find that you’re more of an anti-social gamer though then it probably isn’t worth the cash because what you’re paying for won’t significantly alter the multiplayer game and is more aimed at improving the multiplayer experience by unlocking extras and removing some hassles from your way.


Then again, I suppose if you were an anti-social gamer then you wouldn’t want to be playing online in the first place and the added functions of being able to form groups and chat to other players will probably put you off the game more than turn you on to it.

However, you have to bear in mind that the multiplayer side of things, which lets players join together to complete the single-player campaign, is still growing. EA and Flagship have come out and said that they’ll be adding more content into the game at a later date and that the new content will be accessible only to subscribers.

What that means exactly remains to be seen, but we’re betting it’ll be extra areas, new skills and the usual PvP combat. If that prediction holds true then the subscription cost is definitely going to be a lot more tempting as new features work into the game and the singleplayers get left behind.

I guess it's about time we had a look at the graphics...

Conclusions

Hellgate is a difficult game to score in the end because it really does feel like two, maybe even four separate games. The first division comes from the perspective the player takes in the game – playing it shooter-style with a Marksman really is a very different game experience to playing it as a third-person warrior or mage.

The second and more important division though comes from the multiplayer and singleplayer choice. These really are utterly different games.

The singleplayer campaign has weaknesses. It reuses the same environments and areas to an extent that would shock even F.E.A.R, the NPCs are laughable in a bad way and even when the game is fully pimped out graphically, it still looks like something you’d expect to find festering inside a scab.

Oh, and the plot is fairly limited too – though there are a few little treasure-hunting easter eggs thrown in to make things a bit more interesting. We could say more, but it would spoil it.

The singleplayer has strengths too though. The combat is interesting enough to get us by, but it isn’t really that awe-inspiring. Customisation on the other hand is a great thing and it’s nice to see that players can rip apart old guns to find gadgets that can be used to boost their more powerful weapons.


Multiplayer on the other hand is an entirely different ball game. Here, the game slips out of action RPG classification and clearly declares itself as an MMORPG. By that standard the graphics are pretty good, though still not that great, the plot becomes less skeletal and more just ‘streamlined’ and the clipping issues are more forgiveable.

In multiplayer the game becomes pretty damn good and there’s the promise of more to come as long as EA and Flagship follow through on the plans to add more content for subscribers.

To put it simply, while the singleplayer side of things is on the lesser side of average the multiplayer compensates by being on the lower side of really-quite-good, but still remains above average.

When you get right down to it, Hellgate: London isn’t quite the epic RPG re-imagining that it was hyped up to be and just goes to show that even a team of ex-Blizzard developers don’t always produce golden games. That said, the game is still enjoyable and playable and if you’re after a game which tries to do lots of different things at once then Hellgate is The Safe Bet.

A jack of all trades and a master of none, Hellgate feels like an odd blend of Knights of The Old Republic and Nethack, with a touch of FPS thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, while it keeps a lot of the good stuff from these games it also retains a few of the flaws and we’re left with a game that is probably going to entertain most people for a good twenty or so hours, but which isn’t really going to rock anyone's world.