Good ideas, bad implementation
Flagship Studios, like many splinter companies, tend to stick to their guns to produce games that ring true to their roots while trying to add that extra spice that kicks their product into a new era. Sometimes it pays off but sometimes it falls flat. It happened with Ionstorm for example, both divisions, which had me rethink the "hotshot" developer idea. Maybe the sum of a game's parts isn't greater than the whole. Great ideas are awesome but great games are put to the test in real code. Here Hellgate tries to be a few things, a FPS (here I combine shooter and slasher as the same), an RPG and, in the words of Bill Roper, an MMO.
It has the FPS part down you get to hack and blast a multitude of creatures back into the hell they spawned from and I have to agree that in this regard the game is merely satisfactory. While it is somewhat fun to mow through the hordes of hell the weaponry mostly seems to lack substance with the guns and swords rather unbalanced or untested. Guns generally lack an "oomph", for the lack of a better word, making a gun battle at higher levels rather tedious and the swordplay I find rather annoying since you leap around when you have the attack button pressed while moving in a direction. You can stand and deliver but moving about generally is a good thing when bloodthirsty monsters are looking to make a quick snack of you. This is more of a personal nitpick but I feel somewhat spoiled after playing some superb slasher games that offer a much higher degree of control over your melee character. Gothic, the original, comes to mind as the ultimate in control, while it was difficult to master once done it offered a host of options rather than: (a) stand and hack or( b) prance about and hack. Seeing as this is a hybrid game it is forgivable.
As an RPG HGL fails miserably, not only do you not have any real choice in this game, the story and quests are so bland that I personally skipped reading any quest/story text after the first 2 stations. Aiding in this disregard is the fact that the quests themselves are boringly dead simple. Broken down they are: (a)kill x of y, (b)kill x to obtain y, (c) explore x, (d) frob x numbers of y, (e) frob x on y, or (f) go to x. All of which require no thought at all. I can only attribute the blandness of the questing system with the random level structure. Handily you can determine a storyline quest (purple) versus just another filler quest (yellow) by color. Perhaps this is the role-playing they attempted to add. You can be the guy who just saves the world or the guy who saves the world and some cats, some homeless dude's cardboard box, a park, an elephant, a dime...
Lacking in the story department I prayed the RPG part that most games get right is the character development part since it is the easiest. As true to form you get the generic 5 stat points and 1 skill point formula pretty much standardized since Diablo roared back in the 1996. Nothing new here. Same few stats as usual with the same standard effects. Ranged dmg/effect for your Accuracy, Melee dmg/effect for your Strength, Stamina and Willpower affect your overall health and mana pools. The only kicker is that in some cases you are rather limited in how you spend your points. Depending on the class and play-style you prefer you might end up spending more points in useless stats just to equip certain items. For example a summoner with a penchant for guns will be required to spend points in all stats diluting your overall effectiveness since you will need Accuracy to equip the better guns and Strength to equip better armors, Stamina and Willpower are requirements as well but in general you will be pumping these by default. Yes Strength is a large stat even for a caster class since all items seem to have a random matrix for stat requirements, I have found items that require insane amount of strength/stamina/willpower to equip. You can try to utilize items that require low stats but I find it annoying in the extreme that I cannot equip a legendary due to lack of some stat. Options would be to leave leftover points to try to adjust for dropped loot or wearing stat enhancer items. Like in Diablo and Diablo 2 you will be doing a bit of equipment juggling when you are wearing stat enhancing pieces to wear other items. The only thing to be wary of here is that items you are wearing but lack the stats to support are nonfunctional. They show up as red in your equipped slot and are removed from your character model. In short, if you have played any Diablo game you are pretty much in home territory here.
Stats out of the way we come to the skills. Now here is a really bad design issue. You start off with 1 point in a pre-defined skill... WTF? Some people might not mind but I do, immensely. Add insult to injury, there are no repecs. Wow, talk about a bad start. then it gets worse. all your skill descriptions can range from passable to ambiguous at best and plain confusing at worst. In the worst cases it simply describes an action kind of like "your attacks from some weapons now have a 20% chance to cause your enemies to explode in a fiery shower". That's it, just the percent proc and no real info as to what it means for the effect and no data as to the damage done. Whether it does weapon damage, pre-determined damage, procs on a 10 yard radius, or blows up the entire level, is all up to you to find out. While actually playing the game alleviates this issue, a first play through can lead to a scrapped character. This is plainly wrong. It wouldn't be as bad if the skill tree augmented your skills as the tree progressed into deeper tiers but quite reversely some skills overwrite the previous skills in that the lower tiers suddenly have no place in your hotbars making them all wasted points. Coming back to the no respecs and we have a bad, bad design decision. Note that not all skills are like that but in many cases you are left with a decision to either use your skills now and make things easier for you right now or save your skills until you can make better use of them. Throw in some useless skills in the mix and you have yourself a really bad skill tree. The only hope is that FSS will tweak these skills and trees in later patches.
Now we come to the MMO. Technically you can say that HGL is MMO in the strictest sense but no, really, I mean NO. Instanced in the extreme you will be hard-pressed to find another soul in your immediate station unless you coordinate through other means, online voice and texting programs come to mind. Guildwars had a better structure than this and their online play is free. What you really get here for your $10 a month are promises of new content. So far they have been cosmetic drops. Other than that MP is SP, period. Mobs scale and loot scale to group size but you are still doing the same old campaign with no MP-centric themes like in other real MMOs where you have instanced dungeons that require a bit more thought than just button mashing. The only real problem I have with this MMO claim is the fact that FSS is charging a monthly fee for this type of lobby/instance game. They should have gone the Guildwars route and provided free online content with paid expansions. While $10 a month doesn't seem too bad you have to take in account that this is more of a LAN style game with limited interaction to the overall community. To entice me with paying the online fee I would require real content to justify the expense. A few novelty items keyed to holidays doesn't cut it. Given that it is a new title there is a bit of fudge room here but would it have been so hard to have had a real reason to go multiplayer? Most games allow for interactive features like professions or requiring multiple players to run through an instance/area etc but HGL has nothing of this sort. All it offers is the chance to group or trade items.
There is a featured Hardcore online mode but I really don't see the appeal other than for bragging rights. You get one life to get through the campaign, been there, not impressed. Every game has hardcore mode, if you die delete your character or save. Having it online in a secure environment with that one rule enforced might be heaven for some but in most cases will be a minor player in the stage that is HGL.
The main meat of this dish is the loot. All the rest of this game is window dressing to the act of picking up loot and HGL does this job admirably. A huge assortment of stats and bonuses adorn color coded drops. This is the only reason some people will play this game. I do admit to some modicum of satisfaction when I inspect that new piece of loot and see that it is a nice upgrade to my current collection. You will get some moments of "OMG!" as well when that uber item drops. Lootwhores rejoice, this is a game that certainly pleases in the frequency and, in some cases, quality of the drops. Looking for the ultimate gear is the only reason I come back to HGL. With that being said, if Progress Quest had stats for their random drops though I would be "playing" that instead of HGL.
Another selling point of HGL is that the engine supports random maps, supposedly for replayability. Some people like it, some don't. In the case at hand the limited tile set along with the completely linear nature of the campaign makes this feature rather useless. Get used to crawling around in the same tunnels for a long time. I would have preferred interesting handcrafted levels with random monsters over the current implementation. The random levels all follow the same general flow anyways so you will begin to notice, after the novelty wears off, that you really have been here before. Just maybe this tunnel turns left instead of right. You can even get levels that terminate in ways where you cannot proceed, luckily it is rare. Random quest areas and items also ruin the experience as well. Too many times are quest objects all tucked in some corner all together or, worse yet, there happens to be only one quest item you need to frob and it happens to be spawned right next to the entrance. Anti-climactic.
With all this randomness you would also expect the same from the mobs. Well your wish is granted in your own personal hell. Seriously lacking in actual different mobs HGL tries to mask the fact that you have been beating the same dead horse from level 1 by dressing them up in different outfits. It is a nice touch that the models for mobs do differ slightly in their armory. Sadly they are still the same mob from so long ago. It may have gotten tougher but it has no new tricks. The combat is quite boring as well with the only challenge coming from overwhelming numbers added to increasingly higher hit points. Some variety in mobs would be a welcome change in the coming patches. It would help break the tedium of mowing through yet another pack of zombies or imps. The occasional epic or rare monster might pop up but other than having some random attributes that really don't matter they are just mobs with guaranteed loot, AKA walking treasure chests. Even the bosses are quite straight forward having no real AI like their lesser counterparts. There are just two modes of attack, things either charge you or they employ a hit and run tactic. Don't get too excited over the hit and run mobs though, they are just running away in random directions for a random amount of time. I have had mobs run away from me so far that the aggro reset and I found them wandering aimlessly in another part of the map.
Overall the game is playable. There are no features worthy of note but you won't be sorely disappointed either if you come into this expecting more of the same helping you got before in countless other games. Future patches may make this mediocre game into a marvelous game but will anyone care by then? There will always be the die-hard fan base and to those I wish well. I really wanted to like the game although in the current state it is in I can only say that it is no better and no worse than any other game I have played.
Graphics: 8/10
The models are detailed well with crisp textures and some interesting animations for the monsters. Overdone glow effects and lack of damage skins or damage feedback on mobs. Environment textures are quite nice as well but the individual pieces are too boxy with no interesting features, yes even the organic levels.
Sound: 6/10
Mobs have distinct noises but the lack of variety makes me wish I could turn this off. Boring weapon sounds. No real background music and the tension building "combat" music plays rather randomly so you can have it go off when there are no mobs in sight, usually because you have sniped them all.
Interface: 4/10
Failed. No reasonable way to split stacks. Inability to interact with the world and the UI at the same time. Inability to map the context keys. Bugs abound. Bad FSS, bad.
SP Gameplay: 6/10
Just another FPS with RPG elements. Added 1 point for the lootwhore in me.
MP Gameplay: 2/10
There is no MP, at least there is no reason for it. Instanced to hell, pun intended. Chat system is broken. Requires a monthly fee for the bonus content that I don't find justified. Added 1 point for the lootwhore in me.
Technical Score: 4/10
While functional, many bugs and memory leaks plague this game.
Overall Score: 5/10
Buy it, play it, forget it.