Hellgate: London Review

GameTap has reviewed Hellgate: London to note it does not throw Diablo off its throne, giving it a 7.

Hellgate follows a pretty standard formula: gather weapons, potions, and quests in a town hub, and then go into a randomized dungeon to kill things, get loot, and finish quests to obtain both experience points and even more loot. The backstory is that demons have taken over a futuristic London, and you run around the city (with most of the dungeons being either sewers or wrecked streets, while the town hubs are the train station converted to human safe zones) trying to talk to celestial beings with crazy prophecies and a mystical weapon to use against the demon horde. Pretty standard stuff to go through, for at least 30 hours (I didn’t do all the sidequests). Hellgate is a lot of game.

Actually, most of these quests consist of filler text that I skipped, going straight to the clear goals such as “kill this many of this monster” or “go to that place.” While the bulk of the quests are straightforward affairs where I didn’t even bother reading about why I want to bring back five fellbore heads to Liverpool Street Station, the story-based quests are significantly better. Even though I still can’t really tell you what’s going on in the story and why (my above summary is pretty much my best recollection, although I remember isolated moments like two Templar guys arguing, or a desperate attack against a downed train), the storyline-based quests add enough gameplay factors to make them better than the sidequests. These new factors range from unique locales (there’s a fantastic dungeon involving demonic possession in Act Two) to different gameplay styles (such as an RTS-style quest and a shooting gallery).