Hellgate: London Review

Play.tm is not overly excited about Hellgate: London, though they note the game’s high profile hurts it most and give it 79%.

Lavish cut scenes drive the central story in between each of the game’s acts however the rest of the plot is less well presented. The remaining information quest givers and NPC’s tends to be in the form of text with only the odd few spoken phrases and the writing quality ranges from adequate to horrible with little or no care taken to infuse characters with anything less than a broad stereotype. Thankfully you can often ignore the nuts and bolts of what they say and just focus on the details of the quest itself. These all too often fall into the standard kill/collect x of x, but the continual prospect of finding your next bit of juicy loot around the next corner goes some way to ensuring you’re never bored.

The success of the randomly generated environments these quests take place in depends on your demands for replayability. It’s technologically impressive that no two people will play the same game and starting over will always provide a new experience but I have to admit those plusses don’t mean jack if what you’re playing through isn’t that exciting in the first place. The continual re-use of the same set of building blocks for each level does take a few hours to become apparent, but once it does it’s not something you’re able to forget and no algorithm however advanced can offer the kind of flair a decent level designer can bring to the experience. It also seem to be missing the point a little to set the game in London then make the environments random thereby automatically ensuring they’re unlike the real world locations they claim to be set in. Thankfully some of London’s more iconic environments are set in stone and naturally these provide some of the game’s highlights, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned for next time there.