London had never looked so bad.
After the introduction movie, we see a world being invaded by some sort of creatures from the deepest dark, named demons by us. They're coming through a huge portal called "Hellgate", and, if wasn't a huge group of brave warriors, the invasion was destroyed the entire human race. But this unexpected counter-attack delayed the invasion and a resistance could be formed under London underground, where the Stations were transformed in fortress against the demons.
Soon you'll discover that, even the background history being really interesting, the development is a little confusing and don't make much sense later and can't even make you interested on it. Also, the voices don't help much or even the animation of the NPC's when they're talking to you, looking very unnatural and forced.
Unfortunately, Hellgate London fall in one of the worst flaw of an RPG: it's repetitive, in almost its aspects. Almost all the time you'll spend underground, exploring the uncountable metro rails under London - all looking the same; traveling from Station to Station – that also don't get to much variation, going to the surface in few moments - less than you would expect and that each open area is also little different from the others; killing hordes of the same monsters that will repeat all the game. Secondary missions, that was suppose to give a little of variation for the game, are repetitive too, having few variations, always asking you to do the same things: or to kill some special monster, or to collect some number of items, or to kill certain number of some specific type of monster or even just explore certain area.
The worse type of the secondary mission in Hellgate London is the ones that ask for the player to kill a specific monster and in a certain amount. It's very frustrating stay several minutes looking for the last one, that will be probably hiding in a small place, laughing at you, that already passed by several times without see it. Very sad.
Also, the attribute system can sound repetitive too. Inspired in the Diablo series, here, we got four attributes: Accuracy is the attribute for ranged classes. Willpower is for the mana (here is Power) users. Strength is for melee classes. We also got the Stamina attribute, but it's a secondary attribute for all classes. The skill trees work more like Titan Quest style, where all the skills "open" to that class appears in a single window. But here, the skills on the top come first and are parallel to each other, where each tree is a discipline in which high skills require pre-required skills of its tree and a level limit.
Because of the long time to level up, we got another problem here. Skills will take time to be unlocked and will also take time to be stronger or more effective. This means some repetitive use of skills and the use of the same strategy in combat for some couple of hours. To make things worse – or more repetitive, sword animation are only two or three for normal attacks; the fire weapons all sounds weird, lacking a lot of stopping power, being almost impossible to feel strong with them; for magic, you just need to use them like mad, until the screen is clean.
Maybe because of the complex equipment system of Hellgate London, you can spend more hours than you expected. They're so nice that can make you go forward in the game only to get better gear and see how they will look and work against the demons. You can use several types of equipment and each of them will change the appearance of our character. Also, you can adjust its colors to fit better with the overall appearance. Each run that you make between stations, will make tons of equipment drop from your enemies, making the change of weak gear to a strong gear happens constantly.
Inside each Station, you can find together with the merchants, three types of machines. The first machine, the Nano Forge, will give you the possibility to make refined upgrade in your equipment, using parts of the other equipments that can be disassembled and used here. This is good because the equipments that can only be used by other class can be dismounted and, with the parts, used to upgrade your gear. The second machine is the Augmentrex 3000, that allow you to add some property to your equipment, being these properties the common, rare and legendary properties – and you just need to pay for them, but, each equipment, have a limit of upgrades allowed to them in this machine. The third one is the Delux De-Modificator machine, which allows you to extract any mods from any equipment.
The "mods" work similar to the runes and gems from Diablo 2. Some equipments will have slots for some spefic mod, and when they're added to it, they will make it stronger and much more useful against the hordes.
Depending in which type of weapon you're using, you got different views. If you're using swords and shields, you can only use the third view camera. But, if you're using ranged weapons or only magic, you can change the camera from the third to the first person.
The character edition isn't complex like its gear system, but does the job satisfactory. Basic and simple, you can change the face and hair, the height and bulk, and choose your class, of course, being six in total, where each class will heavily change your appearance, because each one of them has its own type of gear.
The models are nice and, with the advanced use of graphic details, the game can satisfactory please our eyes – even when sometimes the models look a little blurred. Not that Hellgate London is a beautiful game, but pleased me, with nice options for tune it to fit in my machine specs – that are a very modest Pc. Only the textures of the game that make my machine go in slowdown all the time, forcing me to use the medium configuration and it just make some things very ugly, like the panels inside the Stations and some other details from the city and the underground dungeons.
Unfortunately – again, the game make itself very repetitive in the way that it build its own dungeons and open areas. Objects, details, apartments, tunnels, streets, rails, ladders, trees, exits, portals, all are exhaustively repetitive and, even if you exit and load, all will look exactly what was before, even if the game says that is different. Also, I didn't noticed any difference between the DirectX 9 version and the DirectX 10 version/
The monsters models are awesome, but, they're extremely repetitive like almost of all other elements of the game. Face hordes and hordes of two or three types of monsters can be boring, mainly if you put it together with all the other repetitive elements of the game. When I say "horde and hordes", I mean several minutes or maybe some hours facing the same type of enemy.
Hellgate London make me a little disappointed and, unfortunate, is fallen to the category of "good ideas, bad execution" game. I can't recommend it to anyone. If you're a fan of RPG games, maybe you can try it, but I warn you: there many titles that are a lot better and far superior than Hellgate London and you should look for them before try to spend time with this game – mainly if you don't have resources to get it.
*I didn't have the opportunity to try Hellgate London Online.*