Hellgate: London Preview

GameSpy has previewed Hellgate: London, judging it a nice action RPG with too fast a pace for traditional RPG gamers.

The more we began to understand this system, the more we liked it. Building up weapons and armor, hunting down legendary components and creating equipment that enhances the player’s play style is a big chunk of what the player will be doing in Hellgate: London. Getting the last piece of your own personal uber-weapon turns out to be pretty fun and eventually dropping a favored piece because the player has out-leveled it actually becomes painful. There’s even a system to hot-swap between three weapon load-outs because there are five kinds of damage in the game and some demons are more vulnerable to certain types. Smart players will find themselves working on multiple weapons at once that allow them to deal out maximum carnage no matter what kinds of demons they face. The downside is that traditional RPG fans may be a bit put off by such a system because while futzing with one’s inventory has always been part of the CRPG, a random itemization scheme means that there’s no simple ordered procession of equipment and there’s no one “armor of uberness” to quest for.

Of course, traditional CRPG fans may be put off simply by the game’s emphasis on speed rather than setting or storytelling. The game has a story, of course. Some 20-odd years after a demonic invasion of Earth, the last survivors of humanity huddle in the London Underground and make occasional sorties into the demon-haunted world in a desperate attempt to reclaim it. As players travel from magically-warded station to station, they’ll undertake quests given out by the members of the human resistance — many of them of the standard “kill 20 of this and bring back their ears” variety. There are also slightly more complicated main-line quests too and the game does sport an understated, almost British sense of humor (it’s implied that one of the quest givers, for example, is J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame), but the game offers plenty of ways to avoid reading quest text. The game is really all about the action and in the end that may just be enough to make it a hit. We’ll see when Hellgate hits store shelves on October 30th.