Hellgate: London is an Action-RPG game which was released by Flagship Studios in 2007. The game received a great buzz before its release especially due to some very nice trailers which were released to help illustrate the setting.
the Setting of the game is (as the name implies) London. Demon forces have invaded it and your adventure puts you in the place of a survivor who must accomplish different quests to help close the Hellgate. This idea as a plot is an interesting one so when I saw a copy going for a bargain I couldn't resist.
Now for the technical side of things. The graphics are decent and I was satisfied with the overall look (I especially liked the decaying corpses of the zombies). But while the visual side of the game was nice I have issues with the gameplay. The Game uses a random map generator to "make every new dungeon a unique experience". Now while this may look like a good thing on paper, it doesn't stand up to the job and I quickly got an impression of déjà-vu (but I must admit that the 1.2 patch does bring a few new environments so its worth taking a look at). The inventory is also an issue, admittedly not a major one but an annoying one. Some of the designers for this game were the ones who worked on Diablo and you will recognise the inventory system which is the same. The problem is that, when you are picking up items all while killing loads of demons, the game does not organise your inventory in a optimal way. Meaning that you will regularly have to go and reorganise it so you can fit more items in. This really does cut the flow of the action.
But in the end it is not the boring dungeons or the annoying inventory which spells the doom of Hellgate but its bugginess. Indeed the developers clearly rushed the release and as such the game has s***load of bugs. And these are not small ones. I will admit that this game froze up many times and in the end became unplayable. And the 1.2 patch (the last one to be released) didn't improve the issue. So I don't know is this may be due to my machine being to old (I can't be bothered upgrading it for the moment) but I recommend that you maybe try it off a friend before you buy.
Conclusion: I'm sorry Hellgate! I really tried to like you. You had a good story, nice graphics and were enjoyable enough. But when a bug causes a game to freeze after 10 minutes... I think I may have to sever the relationship.
Rating: 2/5
A game which could have been a masterpiece but who's rushed release has made unplayable.
NB: This review only covers the Single-player side of the game since by the time I had bought it the multiplayer servers had been taken down.
