Hellgate: London

Item fiends and "Diablo II" fans will love the complex loot system but most of us will be bored senseless after just a few hours. [Christmas 2007, p.54]

Hellgate: London hooked me, and I think it'll do the same to a lot of other players. But no matter how much I adore its juicy roleplaying sub-systems, I can't get past its wobbly core game. [Dec 2007, p.52]

The game controls easily on the movement front, but breaking in action to press a random button can cause some frustration.

A disappointment. Unfinished, unpolished, monotonous and offering poor value for money with the subscription scheme. Yet it kind of grows on you over time.

Hellgate: London is filled with gorgeous artwork and dripping with atmosphere; it's got a delicious sense of humour and finely tuned combat systems that will be keeping action RPG nuts happy for a long time. Despite this, we've got vast reservations about key aspects of the game; the randomly generated levels feel increasingly hollow, pointless and gimmicky as you progress, the user interface is clunky in some important areas, and there are clearly some hefty bugs here that need patching.

With all its features and the charm from its wicked sense of humor, Hellgate makes for a very entertaining game, but it needs more depth.

Flagship, despite whatever mistakes it's made with Hellgate, still taps into that addicted-to-loot gland in my cranium, and I am willing to put up with its flaws. It's now a matter of whether you want to put up with its somewhat unpolished nature at the moment, or wait until Flagship possibly smoothes out the warts that its little demon is showing.

Hellgate: London has plenty of neat ideas, but many of them aren't executed as well as you'd like.

All in all, Hellgate is a success in the more revolutionary areas of its gameplay, though more attention could have been paid to the typical action RPG elements that seem to have been taken for granted.

It's a sad conclusion to draw, but Hellgate: London will never be remembered as the role-playing classic it could have been with a little more work and a little less time paying homage to its RPG grandfather.

Hellgate: London does have potential though but it's just not there yet. There's a lot of fixing the needs to be done and a lot of bugs to hammer out.

This is exactly the sort of thing Diablo fans have been waiting for and although there’s little chance that it will change your life, there’s every possibility that it will consume it. [Chrismas 2007, p.126]

The scenery is dull and repetitious, and the monsters are slow and stupid, coming at you a few at a time to be dispatched easily when a serious bull rush might actually cause you some trouble.

If you're a fan of action -RPGs, then by all means add this game to your collection. Just don't expect it to be "Diablo 3." That crown still belongs to "Titan Quest."

All in all, Hellgate: London isn’t the next revolution in Diablo-style gameplay.

It bothers me that it seems to think it’s 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 doesn’t bother with the bits it thinks we don’t care about. [Jan 2008, p.49]

An experience that is fun for a few hours but quickly grows repetitive. The stat-driven combat takes the player one step away from the action and the modular levels and peripheral nature of the story keeps players from investing in the world.

Maximum action, minimum story makes it a game you'll only dip in to. [Jan 2008, p.78]

How do you score something that is so hellish (in more than one way) one second and so awesome the next? Hellgate: London probably just needed some extra time in Beta. Maybe pushing for Halloween was too much. I'm in the camp that would rather have a game delayed than have it get over-looked due to technical issues that could've been worked out beforehand.

For all the twisted, macabre, death-worshiping crap that's found in this game, it only makes sense that the game itself should suffer a terrible fate.

Hellgate: London is one of this year's biggest disappointments. It had a whole bunch of great ideas, but squandered them with weak execution, a variety of technical issues and a ridiculous subscription model.

You might get sucked into the online world of competing slayers and level grinding for a while, but the tedium will kill you far quicker than any member of Hell's vast.

If the development team had poured half the creativity and personality into the setting, character, content or story as they did into the fighting and looting, the game might have become a modern-day classic. Instead, what comes out of this Hellgate often feels a little underwhelming.

It seems to borrow too much, and doesn’t really deliver in terms of an immersive story, hoping that the gameplay itself will be addictive enough to keep an audience captive and paying extra per month.

While World Of Warcraft and its peers provide variety through landscape, Hellgate fails utterly to conjure any motivation to investigate the next instanced dungeon. [Christmas 2007, p.97]