Hellgate: London Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on November 19th, 2007

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Having random dungeon creation is claimed by some as an obvious necessity, but with the mere fact that almost all of the locations are of a generic style (perhaps 5 different styles of random levels throughout the game) they seem very plain and repetitive. Random dungeons must be a tricky concept for a 3D world, but having seen the intricate design of many recent games, it seems like a gimmick of a function that sacrifices the quality of design for the hope that playing the same level again with a slightly different layout of where the obligatory rooms and monsters are located will breathe fresh life into the game on each occurrence.

Monster design is generally imaginative, but again with the seemingly random string of enemies in each area, you'll see most of the basic types early on, allowing for renaming and texturing the same models to represent all new creatures, merely boosting their health and skillset. It seems obvious that enemies must get harder to defeat as your weapons improve, but throughout the game I have found that when you manage to locate that all new super powerful weapon from a hidden cache of clichéd explosive barrels your enemies become mysteriously more powerful, negating any sense of feeling like you are improving once the base type of weapon is found.

None of this ruins the game, obviously it's all stuff we've put up with in the past. It just seems odd that the developers seem to have ignored all advances in the genre since... well, since Diablo 2.

But here's the thing for all the criticisms I've just gone through, I actually really enjoy playing Hellgate: London. The combat is surprisingly frantic and satisfying, levelling up your character never really feels like a grind, and the constant promise of new gear to try out makes the game addictive as hell, and highly recommendable to those of you who appreciate a good dungeon crawl.

The rest of you, get a copy of The Witcher instead.

Inventory management. Arrrggh. There I am killing monsters and happily picking up their loot until I can't pick up any more. Then when I check the inventory, I find plenty of room, it's just organized badly. So. I spent the next five minutes reordering my bags to fit the loot. This is one of the things I hated about Diablo too.

The User Interface doesn't help much here. All the screens for inventory management, skills, and the like open full screen and you don't get to see what around. So there I am rearranging my inventory and all of a sudden I start getting attacked. Doh! It would be nice to be able to have a window open and still be able to move or fight. Especially since the game doesn't pause.

Lack of help. There is so much stuff in this game, but no in-game help. Skills are a case in point. Each class has a large number of skills and a very limited number of skill points to put in them. Aside from many of them being useless (or so I've heard) there is minimal description when you hover over them. The only way I've been able to find out about some of them is by visiting the forums. Not good.

Skills. Personally, I think each character has too many, and not enough points to put in them. There's also no way to respec and the devs have said that they are not going to implement one. Now while leveling in Hellgate: London is much faster than other MMOGs, this means that if you stuff up your skills, the only option is to reroll. I tend to think that, especially these days, it's a bit unfriendly.

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