Hellgate Guru

HGG user The_Wolf has pointed out that a new review of the Stonehenge Chronicles has been published by GameSpy.

The article talks of the Stonehenge area and gives a description of how it works, as well as the other added features such as the duel arena which GameSpy says is a great way to blow off steam in between your game sessions.

While the rewards for plowing through the new content were satisfying, we are a bit concerned about how the community will take to the new boss fights. As we already mentioned, it takes hours to collect all the essences to unlock these fights, but the bosses themselves can be defeated in under a minute by many of the most popular class builds. Moloch in particular was a pushover, while Ash gave us far more of a challenge, assaulting us from above with very painful attacks. Errgoth was difficult to a certain degree, until we decided to play the safe tactic and let our bots do the dirty work while we ran away from his nasty ranged attack. While we’re not sure if more difficult bosses would have been the best design choice, the return on your time investment seems pretty small, at least in terms of time played.

The new areas are a nice addition to the game content, with spooky outdoor sections and ominous cathedral-like structures introducing a nice change of pace from the usual mix of trashed London subway stations and ravaged streets. We’d like to see some of this architecture introduced into the regular game, since it does much for a game that can tend to get repetitive despite the strengths of its map randomization.

GameSpy also briefly mention what they hope for this game to do in the future and how they hope there are enough subscribers to let the team develop the game into it’s full potential.

Since release, Hellgate: London has steadily rolled out expanded content for its subscribers, and made changes to the original game to address the issues it had with what can’t be called anything but a premature release. In its current state, the game can be great fun, but it still suffers from a handful of bugs and network issues that impede what would otherwise be one of the more entertaining role-playing experiences around. The concept is brilliantly original, and the gameplay can be great fun. But the frequent disconnects and lag are troubling, as is the completely broken state of the nightmare-level endgame. We’re hoping that there are enough subscribers out there to keep the game improving. Until then, you can find us in the London underground, fighting the good fight.

Head over to GameSpy to read the full article.

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