Game With Potential Has Awful Launch

User Rating: 8.5 | Hellgate: London PC
Hellgate London is a multiplayer game that uses a model similar to Guild Wars where players meet up in centralized areas and can go off an adventure in instances. While there is a single player game included, who is going to play it? You can get the same single player experience in the multiplayer game and show off all your legendary loot to everyone else. It is hard to imagine a multiplayer game today having much worse of a launch than Hellgate London has had over the last two days. Flagships vauge and misleading messages about down times and status are becoming comical. Flagship had been touting the great Halloween launch with special events for subscribers, but since they can't get any subscribers (remember the subscribtion servers are down) they decided to release a patch for everyone that allowed people to get the extra content. The small twenty minute patch took the servers down last night starting at 8PM on the East Coast and five hours later they still were not back up.

You can go buy the game and pay nothing extra for the multiplayer experience and basically run through the single player experience over and over or you can pay 9.99 a month (140ish area if you want a one time founder price) for the subscription service. With the subscription service you get access to elite and hardcore style of play and the promise of regular additional content, events and items etc. I find it hard to believe that Flagship is going to be able to pump out enough regular content to make the 9.99 price sustainable for long. Dungeon Runners 4.99 price point would have probably been a more acceptable model for them to follow.

The gameplay itself is excellent. The character classes are diverse with everything from melee combatants to engineers who build attack robots. The controls are smooth and easy to use. The graphics aren't ground breaking but aren't hard on the eyes either.

I think it is safe to say that a lot of the negative reviews we have seen are based upon a couple of factors... the terrible launch coupled with pitiful communication and the questionable subscription service price structure they have set in place. What would have been a 9 reviewed game is going to get a low 8.5 in my book... as the days and weeks pass that slide could go up or down.