GamerPro has published their annual report on MMOs, choosing to concentrate on three games; Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London and Fury. While they give Hellgate London a “D” grade and don’t have much nice things to say about it, they give a couple of lines that I found interesting.
Basically, Hellgate seems like it’s still trying to recover from its launch. This would explain the slow clip at which content is being delivered to subscribers, and the game’s puzzling lack of essential MMO features (i.e. an auction house and a robust PvP system.) Unfortunately the developers aren’t very forthcoming regarding plans for the game down the line. Indeed, the fact that Hellgate isn’t an MMORPG by the strictest definition of the term is a valid point, but that doesn’t excuse the game’s shortcomings. It’s as if the designers pretend that nothing’s happened since Diablo 2 launched. Hellgate exists in a void and the only people who aren’t crying foul are the purists. But even these people have to admit that content-wise, Hellgate has a long way to go before it can approach the quality of its spiritual predecessor.
Is it silly to have faith in Hellgate? Probably not. While Flagship may have damaged the cred attached to its legacy the company still has enough juice to continue building the game. In the meantime Flagship needs to do something to stoke the good faith of its community. At this point there really isn’t much reason to be a subscriber.
This is the outlook that I’ve had on Hellgate so far and in my opinion FSS has taken the right steps to bring the Faith back.
Japanese gaming website 4Gamer has just published their review of Hellgate: London. The review can be read here in Japanese. For an English translation, click here.
It is a very thorough and well researched review. The author states that it isn’t fair to have reviewed the game during its release, as any judgment in evaluating Hellgate would have been premature as the game’s contents were still unripe and unpolished.
At one point, he makes the following statement:
Though the abandonment starting feeling is strong, the possibility of becoming a masterpiece also : if it sees for the long term.
Travis talks of his experience in playing both Single Player, where he played an Evoker as well as his eventual progression to Multiplayer. There is mention of the troubles he had such as the client instability, the frequent crashes as well as the unbalanced Evoker class (at least in his opinion).
He also talks of the variety of loot in the game and how for him it was a bit too much and made it difficult to really look forward to any sort of uniques that he was particularly fond of, just due to the sheer randomness of a lot of items. A good feature of this review is near its conclusion where Travis mentions what games he was comparing Hellgate to, what gaming he had done before as well as what he liked and didn’t like:
What I Liked: This is a tough one. When the game is working the graphics are capable of some pretty pictures and the action is fun in spurts but there were few times when I wasn’t complaining about the drab levels or the limited monster models.
What I Didn’t Like: Client instability, managing inventory, the glut of worthless items, lack of quest variety, lack of monster variety, lack of level variety, the Evoker class as a whole, weak storytelling, no option to respec, repetitive combat, the terrible chat window and poor single-player support.
There is also a score out of ten in the end, which I am sure many of you will diagree with.
Value Meter: Unless you’ve the patience of a saint and are hard-up for some Diablo-esque gaming, I’d recommend giving this game a pass.
I was hoping to resume newsing on HGG with a good piece of news, but heh, duty comes first. Ben Meier and Rob Wright, hosts of Second Take (Tom’s Hardware’s games-related show) had a talk about the worst games of 2007, and Hellgate: London is on the list, along with games such as L.A.I.R or Fantastic Four.
According to Meier and Wright, HG:L is “plagued by technical issues”, “crashes and glitches”. The biggest blow comes from Wright: “If it did not have these technical issues, would it be a great game ? No, but it might be better, might be a rental [...]“.
It should be noted that this advice is based on Travis Meacham’s upcoming review, and that Meacham is “prepared to say that it will be one of his worst reviewed games of the year”.
Primotech has published their game of the year awards for 2007, and they list Hellgate London as their most disappointing game of 2007.
Hellgate London is not a bad game, but it is the biggest disappointment of the year.
The title showed so much promise: it was to be the first major project from Flagship Studios, the newly created team staffed by high level ex-Blizzard employees. With a game this similar to Diablo created by the people who actually made Diablo, we can’t help but make comparisons, and unfortunately, that’s where Hellgate falls well short.
The game lacks the same addictive quality that made Diablo what it was. To top it all off, the fee structure is unusual, to say the least. Not only do players have to shell out full price for the game, but also need to pay a monthly fee if they don’t want to be at a disadvantage when playing online.
And, if you were one of the unfortunate souls to have paid for all of that, your online character may have been suddenly wiped clean shortly after the game’s release.
You’ll notice that we haven’t posted a review of the game. It’s because none of us have been able to bring ourselves to play long enough to actually write one. Here’s hoping that 2008 brings a better offering from Flagship.
What is your opinion of the game? Was it the most disappointing game for 2007 to you as well or have you found a way to enjoy the game even with the bugs? Join our forums to discuss
The Game Informer magazine has reviewed Hellgate London in it’s current issue. Thanks to HGG member ty1134 we have a scan of the review.
They talk of the games positives such as the gameplay, items, randomly generated levels, however also mention the negatives such as the repeated quests and areas as well as HGL being more of a good Co-Op game rather than an MMO. They do say that what the game does well, it does very well, but it’s bad points is that it doesn’t venture too far out of its scope.
All in all, Game Informer gives Hellgate London 8.5/10 and gives the following points:
Concept: Apply Diablo style leveling and loot grinding to a 3D rendered post apocalyptic vision of Earth
Graphics: Quite nice, especially the variety with which you can customise your avatar’s appearance via equipment
Sound: Voiceover are good, but the effects grate after a while and the music annoyingly only plays about 15 percent of the time
Playability: The action is fast, interface smooth, and loads short
Entertainment: You won’t find better level and loot grinding anywhere, but that’s about all this offers
Replay Value: High
It then goes on to say that you can play the game free, and if you fall in love with it, it’s well worth the $10 per month to become a subscriber.
PC Powerplay, an Australian gaming magazine has published a review of Hellgate London in their most current issue. While we do not have scans, we actually don’t publish scans on this website anymore, so don’t expect to see them. However HGG member Darksabre posted a summary of the article that I will now shamelessly copy and paste here!
The two-page review features six screenshots, a boxout of classes and a few pictures regarding the skill tree, inventory and world map.
Quotes from the article:
POSITIVES:
“If you like action RPG’s you should buy this game. If you like FPS games, you should buy this game. If you like RPG/FPS games, you should probably start cancelling your social committments for the next six months”
“Killing baddies is the heart of the game, and it’s both visuall appealing and fun in a classic Quake kind of way: the difficulty is pitched just right”
“Hellgate is a wonderfully deep, wonderfully balanced Diablo 2 ripoff”
NEGATIVES:
“The side quests are uniformly awful, presented 1997 style, as poorly written text over poorly written dialogue, and the central plot isn’t much better”
“But Hellgate wants 28 different kinds of magical pants, and couldn’t stretch back stories for any of them, so its greenhorn dungarees for you, hero”
“It bothers me that Hellgate pretends. It bothers me that it thinks its an update, not a rehash of the dungeon crawl formula It bothers me that it could have been so much more. But it is what it is: a good game which doesnt bother with the bits it thinks we don’t care about”
No mention is given to online modes, subscription or ongoing updates or patches.
7/10
+ Insanely replayable
+ Easy to learn, hard to master
+ Great monster designs
- Unexciting Story
- Recycled RPG cliches
- Little sense of immersion
MMOSite is having a best of 2007 vote for their annual Reader’s Choice Award, and Kaiser over at the official Hellgate London website points us to the entries that their company has.
Popular gaming website MMOsite is currently running its annual Reader’s Choice Awards. As the title implies, the winners are decided by you, the players.
Hellgate: London has been nominated for several categories, including Best New Game and Best Graphics. Actually, our other game Mythos has been nominated as well, for Most Anticipated game of 2007.
If you want to put in your vote for our games, just head on over to this link and click on any of the categories. Thanks!
Windows Vista Magazine has posted some new benchmarks of Hellgate: London armed with multiplayer Patch 0.5 and updated drivers (which can be found via a link in the article).
Here are the results in a nutshell for the Hellgate’s outdoor levels:
· DX-10 MP 0.5 is wee bit faster than SP 0.1
· Little sensation: Armed with the latest Catalyst drivers, AMD/ATI-HD2900-XT- and HD3870 Cards do quite alright in DX10.
More benchmarks, including ones for Hellgate’s indoor levels are to come on Monday, so stay tuned! The article can be discussed here.
While we would all want Zero Punctuation to review Hellgate London, we weren’t so lucky. However the Escapist online Magazine has plenty of qualified reviewers and one of them, Adam LaMosca had the pleasure of playing through Hellgate for over 30 hours now.
He has similar views to say that many other reviews have done, however he goes on to say that with polish HGL could potentialy be great.
It might be stuck with the lackluster review scores prompted by its problematic retail release, but Hellgate still has the potential to become a worthy successor to Diablo.
His negative views of the game are the usual bugs, lack of environments as well as a small stash and lightness of features. He does however finish with this:
Hellgate’s obviously premature release earned a lukewarm critical reception that, given numerous recent bug fixes, may already be undeserved. Even in its current state, it’s an appealing, rewarding, and addictive game. With a bit more fine-tuning its out-of-the box online component would be well worth the retail price. Were Flagship to completely iron out the wrinkles and start delivering some genuinely interesting exclusive content, Hellgate’s subscription service could eventually become a no-brainer.
Hellgate Guru was founded in mid-2005 and has ever since been one of the most popular fan sites and forums devoted to Hellgate: London, catering to a wide range of interests, as well as having a dedicated team of staff members who keep the website full of constant updates, news and generate activity and hype around the game. More
