Before we begin, let’s save Diablo fans a little time. Go get Hellgate: London – you’ll like it.
OK. Moving along.
A difficult game to pin down, Hellgate London mixes genres with a big, super-charged wooden spoon and, as you’d expect from the venerable adage “Jack of all trades…”, succeeds in some and falls a little flat in others.
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| Not quite how you’d imagine the Knights Templar, eh? Still, they seem to remember how to swing a sword in the name of God | When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth. And get mown down by high-voltage gunfire! |
But the best place to begin is with Hellgate’s terrific setup. Throughout history, the Knights Templar has been defending us against Hell’s minions. From the Crusades to the Great Fire of London, many battles and historical events we know so well were actually the Templar repelling the Morning Star and all his naughty little wizards. Sorry, that sounded condescending, and it wasn’t meant to be, although there’re certain glaring clues that suggest this is a game based in England but written by some kind of foreigner.
No matter, as this foreign fellow (Canadian, I believe, so it could have been worse) has astutely tied many facets of British history and its numerous closed societies together in a most ingenious way. The Templars lost their authority over the years, and although the Masonic brothers designed the London Underground to be demon proof, little has been done in the meantime to keep the demon wolves from the door. By 2038, Hell has broken through, and a post apocalyptic London has become the frontline for an arcane war of quite literally biblical proportions.
It could be my imagination, but a trace undercurrent of black humour seems to permeate the backstory of Hellgate, much to its credit. We’ve seen a lot of Templar and secret, all powerful society and immeasurably evil entity related gameplay lately (Jericho and Assassin’s Creed immediately spring to mind) so it’s refreshing to meet a game that doesn’t get caught up too much in its own hype and self-congratulating seriousness.
Again, it could be in my mind, but the English gamers who don’t actually live in London (all the foreign readers out there might be interested to know there’s a significant part of our country based outside the M25, despite our tax administration believing otherwise) will raise a dry smile when they get to compare Hell to the war torn streets of the capital during gameplay; as you already guessed, Hell is far more pleasant and immediately reminds you of the classic one liner “If I owned London and Hell, I’d rent out London and live in Hell!”.
So, here we are, a group of technologically and magically enhanced modern day Knights Templar hiding out with Cockney survivors in the safety of the Underground system and its many tube stations. It’s at this point it becomes obvious as to the developer’s intended future of Hellgate; these “safe areas” will undoubtedly provide the kind of communal congregation hubs found in MMORPGs and MUDs – something we’re quasi-promised by the intimations of subscription online play.
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| Personally I enjoyed the melee combat, though it does descend into button mashing a lot of the time |
Venturing out into the randomised maps of the tube system and overground streets of The Smoke, gamers do battle against a huge variety of minions and bosses, all spawned just as indiscriminately as the maps. At first glance, the idea of a randomised play area sounds pretty fantastic, and the replay possibilities immediately begin to form in your mind. Unfortunately, the sheer mechanics of achieving this by automation as satisfactorily as a human designer might is too much to expect, even of Flagship’s impressive proprietary engine. The result is… well, quite clearly random. Objectives are dropped almost on top of each other at times, or right next to the starting point at others. The necessarily repetitive nature of the system makes for long and uninspired trawls through tube systems that bear little resemblance to their purpose, while street side monuments appear at equally disjointed intervals.
In principle, this system could have been a huge boon to Hellgate’s playability, and may yet reveal its true worth should those lofty dreams of massive multiplayer subscriptions come to fruition, but in the meantime it makes for a cumbersome and disjointed environment.
Once those randomly spawned minions begin springing forth from Hell’s tidy dominion, it’s time to send them straight back. There are six different classes available, and each one seems to be well developed enough so even stalwart engineers will enjoy a jaunt around Hellgate as a marksman or blademaster. As the action heats up (which is does quickly) there’s an immediate sense of FPS elements coming into play, which are handled adeptly and accurately.
Bolt on (and removable) power ups and add-ons are available for weapons, that can be swapped from one to the next allowing for a huge number of combinations and customisation when it comes to battle. Views change automatically from first person to third person depending on the weapon in use; a mechanism not often seen, though we might well find it cropping up more now Hellgate has made such effective use of it.
That’s not to say Hellgate is a first person shooter, but it borrows liberally from that particular genre without restrain and without asking permission. Confining itself to more established role playing combat systems would slow the momentum of this high octane action game too much, so it would seem to be a gamble that’s paid off very well.
Other aspects from the RPG staple are fully intact and far less refined, however. The inventory system seems to have reverted to a rather outdated method of requiring players to shuffle the items around inside their pockets, Tetris style, to make everything fit. A somewhat jarring an aggravating system that seems totally out of place with the action packed events Hellgate tries so hard to establish.
A significant part of Hellgate’s build up has been the online element. Free to play online is available right from the start, allowing groups of gamers to gather together in a Tube station hub and head out on instanced missions and war mongering. All good fun and it appears to work quite nicely on a high speed connection (unfortunately you’re offline character can’t be transported to online play, however), though Flagship has other aspirations for Hellgate’s web based community. A subscription play is to be offered which, alongside extra content such as missions, weaponry and various other bolt-on goodies, seems to be surreptitiously aiming toward expanding the game into an MMORPG.
Precisely how or even if this will work isn’t clear – certainly not from information available, at least. Should the game reach significant success levels, Flagship and EA will have deftly established a consumer base before going to the massive expense of setting up an MMORPG sustainable network of servers, and if it doesn’t catch on, well, no big deal. The game’s still selling as normal and won’t be devoid of support. Something pretty spectacular will have to be offered in the meantime to convince players to take out a subscription, so we’ll really have to wait and see how enthusiastic the developers really are about building Hellgate into a full, online massively multi-player.
Meanwhile, anyone intrigued by this idea of a vastly expanded game universe should start saving to upgrade their rig. Hellgate London demands a lot from your system, and even on a reasonably highly spec’d PC, frame rates regularly dropped to one a second as action heated up, and the system took a disappointingly long time to recover from the strain. A very minimal restart before play, with the absolute minimum number of processes running in the background seemed to help a little, but this removes Hellgate from the “have a quick go” category and makes it a chore to load. I received an email mid-play, and the system hung for almost ten minutes, so wimps beware.
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| These randomised tunnels quickly start to look all the same, and twist and turn like they serve no actual purpose | There’s some excellent special effects throughout Hellgate, and you’ll certainly get to see them when your system inevitably grinds to a halt and the screen freezes, full of fire |
All in all, Hellgate is a success in the more revolutionary areas of its gameplay, though more attention could have been paid to the typical action RPG elements that seem to have been taken for granted. There’s a lot to this game, and hardcore players will enjoy sinking their teeth into something with so much meat, but casual gamers won’t have anywhere near enough patience to milk the fun elements from the gameplay. The story’s not over until we see how the integral replay aspects pan out, and initial reactions suggest they could go either way.
Top Game Moment:
TOP GAME MOMENT
Equipment customisation adds a lot of depth to the Diablo-esque gameplay.
