Hellgate: London Preview and Media

AtomicGamer has posted a new Hellgate: London preview, as well as some high definition footage and a handful of screenshots from the game’s ongoing beta test. An excerpt from the preview:

Hellgate currently includes three weapon slots for you to switch to, and if you’re dual-wielding, then both guns can be housed in one of these slots (and you can have one one-handed gun working its magic in two different slots with different pairings, if you like). For the melee classes, there are a few small restrictions but you’ll also get to wield a gun and a sword simultaneously. For the most part, each of your hands works independently, allowing you to fire at will however you like, although once you’re in mid-melee swing you can’t fire your gun. Since none of the weapons in this game have any ammo, most guns can be just spammed if you like, but some have a pretty slow timer before you can take another shot and still others can fire continuously but will lose up to half of their effectiveness unless you give them a couple seconds’ break. Adding all this up means that no matter what your class, your weapons are a major part of the game.

One of my favorite parts of Hellgate: London is that with a scroll of the mousewheel you can seamlessly transition from a first-person mode to a third-person mode. Yeah, a bunch of games have something like this, but many of them don’t handle the switch between the two viewpoints correctly – either the third-person crosshair doesn’t work right, or your guns aren’t visible in first person mode. If it’s not that, there’s some strange thing that makes it annoying to a player that’s used to either viewpoint. Hellgate works great in both modes, and while I felt like I should have been able to throw out some kind of built-in secondary attack or bash people with the butt of my gun in first-person mode, that’s just a holdover from what players usually get in a FPS. The feeling passed quickly.