Hellgate: London Review
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I participated in the beta and I was surprised that Hellgate: London wasn't delayed as there were a great deal of bugs I encountered during the game. The final version has its fair share as well. I've witnessed a texture-less station where all I could see was grey blocks and people walking around. Once in a while I'll walk through a dungeon where I killed some monsters only to see one floating in mid air. And yes, I did experience a few crashes with the game. It didn't help that after the first week of playing I had to download a few patches already. Some of the patches made my machine crash intensely so there seems to be some small issue with quality control in the updates. Just recently, I ran into a few spots in both the stations and in the levels where I would become stuck and can't move at all. My only course of action was to end the game and reload which really sucked when I was close to the entrance to another level I was heading to. This forced me to traverse the level again and take out the monsters to get to the entrance of the next area. I know Hellgate: London's been a long time coming but if the software isn't ready you shouldn't make people pay $50 to be your beta testers for the next few months to try to iron out more bugs. It is sad when there are zero day patches released for a game but Hellgate: London's got multiple patches and it's still really early in the release cycle.Spotted on Blue's News.
There's some controversy about the monthly free that Flagship Studios has in place for Hellgate: London. Right now, I don't see much value other than being able have a few more character slots, guilds, and more stash space. You don't have to pay to play multiplayer but it will probably be a while before we see any benefit for paying the subscription fee. If Flagship Studios can generate a consistent amount of new content for the subscribers then it might be worth it but I have a feeling they're going to spend the majority of the first few months of the release fixing bugs.
Hellgate: London does have potential though but it's just not there yet. There's a lot of fixing the needs to be done and a lot of bugs to hammer out. There must be something there for me to come back again and again for quick mission or two. It's definitely a game I hope succeeds in the long run but right now it just needs to address many many issues. If I wrote the review a few weeks ago after my first few initial experiences, the score would definitely be lower but the game has grown on me a little the longer I play. It's certainly not up to the expectations I had for it but if Flagship Studios continues to refine the game I think it can become a pretty good product.
