Hellgate: London Review
-
Category: ReviewsHits: 14373
Article Index
Page 2 of 4
Hellgate: London's campaign takes about 60 hours to complete if you go everywhere and work your way through every quest. I'd argue that this is way too long for an action role-playing game where the story can be shortened or lengthened at will. If you have multiple classes and difficulty settings for people to try out, then 30 hours is just fine, because if the game is worth playing then people will put over 100 hours into it regardless. But Hellgate: London's campaign started to wear me down after a while (at around the 40-hour mark when all of the enemies and locations turn into repeats), and I was more than ready for it to be over by the time I got to the end. One more thing about the campaign, and then I'll move on. I was a little bit disappointed that Flagship Studios didn't take better advantage of the setting. Supposedly some of the locations were modeled after their real-life counterparts, and you get to visit places like Piccadilly Circus and the British Museum, but I couldn't tell the difference. All of the locations looked the same (not to mention grey and bland) to me. I think the campaign would have been more fun if there had been a quest to clear the demons off the Tower Bridge, or to keep a demon from sabotaging Big Ben, or something like that. Other than the names of the locations, the campaign could have taken place in any anonymous city in the world.
Character Development
Once you get past the primarily single player aspects of Hellgate: London, the game starts looking better. Let me start with character development. In Hellgate: London you can select one of six character classes. The Templar include Guardians (sword and shield warriors) and Blademasters (dual-wielding warriors), the Cabalists include Summoners (summoning casters) and Evokers (damaging casters), and the Hunters include Marksmen (gunmen) and Engineers (gunmen with drones).
Each class gets 26-27 skills, which can be bought and upgraded with skill points. Characters get a skill point each time they gain a level, but they only advance their level about 30 times during the course of the campaign (and the level cap is only 50), but the skills can hold about 250 points in total, and so you can't sample and learn everything with one character, or even come close. That means you have to map out where you want to go early in the game, which isn't easy because the skills are somewhat complicated. There aren't many friendly passive skills, and sometimes the active skills conflict with each other.
As an example, Marksmen can learn the Sniper skill or the Tactical Stance skill. Both skills are active skills that give Marksmen a bonus when they fight without moving, but you can't use both at the same time, and so you have to choose one or the other. They can also choose between skills like Escape (which briefly turns them invisible), Explosive Grenade (which allows them to produce and throw fire grenades), Dead Eye (which increases their critical chance), and Rapid Fire (which improves their firing rate, but which can't be used with the Tactical Stance).
The first point in a skill usually gives the most benefit, encouraging players to spread out their points, but since skills are mostly active, you probably don't want to try and juggle a dozen of them, and so you also need to specialize a little. Conflicting motivations like that, plus skills that do similar things (for example, Marksmen get four grenade skills), mean that the classes aren't cookie cutters. Two characters of the same class aren't necessarily going to be anything alike, which is a good thing -- and which is also something that helps with replayability. Even if you only like one of the six classes, you might find a few different ways to build it up, and you might want to try them all out in the campaign.
Characters also get four attributes -- strength, accuracy, stamina and willpower -- that do about what you'd expect, but just to a lesser extent. For example, each point in strength only adds 1% to a character's melee damage, and each point in willpower only adds two to a character's power points (which are used for spells and skills). Characters get five attribute points per level plus a bunch of attribute points for completing quests, but you have to spread these points around pretty evenly because mostly what the attributes do is control what equipment you can wear, and these items tend to require all four attributes. For example, you can attach (mods) to weapons to improve their performance, but mods require willpower, and so everybody needs willpower.
