Hellgate: London Review

Another middling review of Hellgate: London comes from Ace Gamez, who give it a 7.

In many ways it’s quite surprising how little difference the shift of perspective has on proceedings, but immediately after looting the first monster’s cold dead body you do get flashbacks to 1994 – including the irritating process of having to rearrange your inventory every five minutes to fit the new exciting pair of booties you’ve just acquired. With that said, in other areas they’ve made great strides in the old RPG mechanics – you can break useless inventory items to access their components, which can be used to make better weapons for example, and you can upgrade your existing weapons with batteries, ammo packs and fuel pods. There are also machines at the tube stations (the bases where you save, and buy and sell stuff) that allow you to remove upgrades from weapons, which mean the old days of wasting a super power-up in your bow and arrow only to find a better one around the corner don’t frustrate anymore.

Unfortunately, elsewhere Hellgate is firmly stuck in the Twentieth Century. There’s the RPG staple of randomly generated maps for example – in principle a clever way of creating a unique multiplayer experience every time, but in reality an exercise in poorly laid out repetition. By using the same textures over and over again, all you end up with are several identical looking stereotypical London streets with the same degree of linearity as a 30cm ruler. This is partly down to the change of perspective – if the developers had made a first person game that was as open as a traditional top down RPG then it would be incredibly easy to get lost and frustrated. As a result, the randomly generated maps are very cramped, leading you down a set route. If you go the wrong way you very quickly reach a dead end and discover that the other direction is the way you wanted to go all along. Put simply, the game could have made some excellent level designs that FPS aficionados are used to – but a computer cannot (at this stage) randomise in such a way to play particularly well. I can understand that randomised maps are kind of necessary for multiplayer (it would be dull if there were no surprises when playing with friends) but a bit of good single player level design would have made the world of difference in single player – especially as the generic textures repeat themselves to the degree of irritation just a few hours in.

…RPG staple of randomly generated maps?