Review Your daily dose of Hellgate reviews

[Calis]

Tags: Hellgate: London

First one is from <A HREF="http://www.actiontrip.com/reviews/hellgatelondon.phtml" target="_blank">Actiontrip</A>:<blockquote>The gameplay itself took me by surprise in a good way. The Hellgate: London can be addicting. It could be the random items that drop from the monsters or crates. It might be the chance of finding a named mob just around the corner. Or it could be the special mini game that involves killing a certain number of creatures in a specific fashion indicated by three special symbols in the bottom right of your screen that rewards you with a burst of cash and special items. The loot whore in me sits up and applauds this system but there is more here to like than just loot.</blockquote>
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Ah, the in-depth gameplay analysis and superior interpunction warm my cold, black heart. Then again, there doesn't seem to be all that much to analyze, as I'm sure <A HREF="http://www.yougamers.com/reviews/13987_hellgate_london/" target="_blank">YouGamers</A> would agree:<blockquote>The overall game is mostly about whacking or shooting endless piles of hellish monsters, and laughing all the way to the merchant with the loot, but there are few additional objectives to aim for. You can improve your gear: mods that can be inserted and removed, assuming the equipment piece has the correct type of slot available. Crafting stations can also be used to improve and build items, using crafting materials available by dismantling excess loot. In general, all the low grade trash gets dismantled and only the best items are worth using or carrying back for sale at a station.</blockquote>
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Not a bad thing, according to <A HREF="http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/gizmos/2007/11/hellgate_london_first_take.htm" target="_blank">The Sandbox</A>:
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<blockquote>So far, I must admit. I'm hooked. This is not a deep, tactical game -- at least not as far as I've progressed. One can easily jump in and get going. There is a story, but it is forgettable and peripheral. But the progression of abilities and loot feels just right. And it's hard to stop playing.
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More will follow, as I progress further....</blockquote>
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<A HREF="http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/35706" target="_blank">Gamers with jobs</A> delivers a nice dose of honesty, mixing criticism of the game with an admission of slight bias:<blockquote>Perhaps this next statement breaks either some unspoken bond of trust I have contracted with you as a reader, or bursts a little too boldly through the fourth wall, but what are these perspectives for if not to be uncommonly honest with you, so here goes: I find myself wanting to make excuses for Hellgate London. In fact, I dare suggest I’m not the only one, because despite what are mind-numbingly apparent flaws in its current state I want this title to be good. I want to encourage more developers to strike off on their own and try to bring their visions for great games to fruition, and I want to be positive about what should be a fantastic game, but let’s be honest. This game is what happens when great designers run at full speed into the brick wall of a financially mandated hard deadline, the inevitable trainwreck of simply running out of time and money.</blockquote>
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<A HREF="http://uk.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/hellgatelondon/review.html?sid=6182588" target="_blank">Gamespot UK</A> also mentions the issues with the AI, multiplayer accounts and a general lack of polish, and concludes:
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<blockquote>If you love hoarding stuff and don't mind repetition, Hellgate: London is a really neat but often uneven game that will probably keep you busy for at least a month or two, even if you don't subscribe. But, for many, the game's issues will be a real deal breaker. If you're on the fence, you might want to watch the game's patch notes to see how many technical glitches, as well as other annoyances, are cleared up.</blockquote>
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Either all those reviewers have a huge tolerance for annoying shit, or the potential of this demonsmashing graphicsfest really does shine through all the issues.
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Links were yanked from <A HREF="http://www.rpgwatch.com" target="_blank">RPG Watch</A> and <A HREF="http://www.bluesnews.com" target="_blank">Blue's</A>

 

[Sovard]

Calis put up news!

 

[Calis]

Yeah, I'm partying like it's 2000!

 

[trais]

(..) Or it could be the special mini game that involves killing a certain number of creatures in a specific fashion indicated by three special symbols in the bottom right of your screen that rewards you with a burst of cash and special items. (...)

(...) The overall game is mostly about whacking or shooting endless piles of hellish monsters, and laughing all the way to the merchant with the loot (...)

(...) There is a story, but it is forgettable and peripheral.(...)

Waste of time and money, if you ask me.

 

[Riso]

We already have several games on the market focused on doing all that shit.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

A truly awful game.

 

[Nael]

A truly awful game.

But did you pay the $9.99 a month to get the full game!? What a deal!

EDIT: A serious thought though... I have often wondered what it was about the grindtastic nature of MMORPGs that demands a monthly payment? I swear when I started getting sick of playing Everquest it felt almost like the game was just using my CPU cycles while I sat and grinded for items that would eventually help me sit around and grind for more items. It's like SETI@Home with cyborzex.

On the other hand FPS games are almost all subscription free and you actually get to play something that resembles a fucking video game.

WTF?

 

[vrok]

HGL isn't an MMORPG, despite the fact that it sucks ass and that that may coincide with your opinion of MMORPGs. Please don't perpetuate this lie any further through insinuation or otherwise. It's D2 with in-game Battle.net, or Guild Wars (also not an MMORPG) if you will.

Regarding your silly thought, FPSs don't require the developer/publisher to host all servers. Other than that, greed.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

A truly awful game.

But did you pay the $9.99 a month to get the full game!? What a deal!

EDIT: A serious thought though... I have often wondered what it was about the grindtastic nature of MMORPGs that demands a monthly payment? I swear when I started getting sick of playing Everquest it felt almost like the game was just using my CPU cycles while I sat and grinded for items that would eventually help me sit around and grind for more items. It's like SETI@Home with cyborzex.

On the other hand FPS games are almost all subscription free and you actually get to play something that resembles a fucking video game.

WTF?

Admittedly I didn't buy the full game, I played the demo, but I hated every single second of it. And I think its fair to base my opinions of my game off the demo, after all the demo is meant to be a sample of the true game, meant to give a small impression of what the final product is like, and if I hated the demo then it would be a fair assumption that I would hate the game too.

 

[vrok]

The demo is exactly like the full game. You missed nothing.

 

[Chefe]

This sounds very boring and expensive.

Why do studios even bother making this shit?

 

[JarlFrank]

This sounds very boring and expensive.

Why do studios even bother making this shit?

Make money. Lots of it.

 

[obediah]

I have such a weird relationship with bioware games. I rarely have anything nice to say about them critically. But they are generally at least mildly entertaining. And as they get crappier they also get shorter which is nice of them.,

I'm pretty sure I'm will wait until ME is $30, but every time I see something about it I get a little twinge of interest. down there.

 

[Nightjed]

i dont get why reviews keep praising the loot, i got a chance to try it out in my friends home (who wasted his bandwith with it and deleted it before i even left his home), the loot is freaking awful, about 80% of your findings are unusable because of the class specific crap and the things you do find for your character are very often the same thing over and over again but with different color, its true i didnt play very far but i doubt this changes much, specially the char specific thing

and if you played the demo you got a taste of the best, the blademaster and the marksman are definitely the best classes, first of all a lot of the skills are SHARED, so even with that low skill count, its actually much lower.
the guardian sucks, most of skills are auras so you can only really use 1 or 2 the rest are useless
the engineer is playable only while high or drunk and with the speakers turned off, the sounds the bots make will completely destroy your brain and the lights will put you into a seizure for sure. also your bots wont regenerate forcing you to recast or cure them all the time.

i cant say much of the summoner and the evoker because i couldnt see the high level skils and the game doesnt let you "try out" skill choices, they have more choices than the rest, but their weapons shoot really really slow and you are forced to use a "focus weapon" for spells and that really really sucks forcing you to spend all the time switching weapons.

and about the graphics, i mean, come on, every other game that came out this month has MUCH better graphics, animations and even physics system. how they even plan to compete against crysis is beyond me, i would market them as "crappy graphics that at least work on a year old computer"

 

[Nastyvale]

Here's another =http://www.egcgames.com/content.php?id=78][b]review[/b]

 

[Jason]

The = goes inside the brackets, right after url.

 

[Herbert West]

Butchering monsters from hell? The ONLY recent game offering that that sucked me in instantly was Painkiller. It's a perfectly executed old-school run and gun FPS with ludicrus ammounts of monsters and gore, outrageous weapons,[melee monster-grinder included], and bizzare levels. All this writing makes me want to play it again. It's over the top, supercharged slugfest and it feels as good as Doom in ye olden days.

Hellgate tries to be serious amid all those baffling video game cliches and falls flat, not to mention bugs and [wtf!] subscription.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

The WTF subscription thing is what made me think that Hellgate London wasn't going to come close to Diablo 2. I don't think Battle.net would have been remotely as successful for Diablo as it was if there were a monthly fee. In fact, I'm not sure there would have been a Diablo 2 if they wanted a monthly fee to play the original Diablo online.

 

[Section8]

Butchering monsters from hell? The ONLY recent game offering that that sucked me in instantly was Painkiller. It's a perfectly executed old-school run and gun FPS with ludicrus ammounts of monsters and gore, outrageous weapons,[melee monster-grinder included], and bizzare levels. All this writing makes me want to play it again. It's over the top, supercharged slugfest and it feels as good as Doom in ye olden days.

Painkiller is good fun, but I never really liked the "walk into room, room locks you in, monsters spawn, monsters die, repeat" formula.