Hellgate LondonWelcome everyone and all to the show. This is what I like to call the "Official Review of Hellgate London V1.0."

Hellgate London has had one of the rockiest starts I have seen for a while. It's been plagued by glitches, downtime, bugs, and haters haterizing it. However, it has been three months. I gave it a chance, and see if it would deliver.

I tried to understand the sloppy release, and I think I may have: New Company. Not making any money for publisher (EA), because no games. Taking a long time. New company so publisher don't give a rats booty. They needed to release something that would cost money.

I have faith in their next game, whatever it may be. They will not be a new company. They have a fan base. They have an income (especially with subscriptions).

Let's start with the review.

Hellgate London was released October 31, 2007. I choose to save my official review for them to get the "kinks" out. They've done a lot, but let's see if that could raise their review score on XPlay from a 2/5 to something a little higher. The story of Hellgate revolves around London being taken over by demons. There's something about a book. There's something about Crazy people and such.

Really the story is where Hellgate suffers the most. First, the best cinematics in the game are at the beginning and at the end. The rest are just of a book and a person talking. Second, the characters in game have no voice acting except general "hello and good bye" speeches that are randomly generated. So you have to read everything if you really want the story and such. Most of it is just worthless to be honest. Someone telling you to kill 10 felbornes using a few paragraphs basically. At least in Diablo 2 they had voice actors say everything.

Now I'm not lazy. I would read every little thing, but that's asking a lot considering how much reading there is. There are some memorable characters. If you do have the time to read some of the lines, some of them are funny and make you appreciate the character a little more. There's also some spoken lines that are pretty funny too, like the first time you hear a certain someone say "What they S*** do we have here!" Or I'll come right and say it, Arlo is a pretty cool shop keep. Then there's Techsmith 413, and his crazy owner. I forget the name. Yes, he's memorable, but having his name spoken to me would have made me remember his name. There are really no memorable charcter's like Decard Cain, though.

So in conclusion for the story, I give it a
4/10

Game play is probably one of the more important things of any game. And this is where Hellgate really excels.

It is a dungeon crowler. Yes you do go around picking up items. May sound boring or whatever, but I really do enjoy it. You go around doing quests, to level up so you can use a sweet item that you found, or you want to upgrade an existing item. You can actually upgrade existing items, mod them, or even add rare, enhanced, legendary attributes to the item. The game doesn't focus as much on skills, as it does on items. I never found myself going "I need to get to level xx so I can use xx skill." I have however found myself going, "I need to gain another level so I can use this item." or "I need to gain another level because I need more stats." That's another thing with Hellgate London.

Items use up a certain amount of stats. For instance, If I have 50 willpower, and I have an item that uses 20 willpower, I only have 30 more willpower to use with other items. The stats also do other things, like accuracy makes your crosshair smaller. Willpower also give you more magic or mana or whatever it's called in this game. I don't know. Stregth is generally used for Armors. Stamana is used for health. Another wierd thing with the magic is, if you are a Summoner, and you summon a demon, that takes some of your max magic away. It's interesting. Those are kinda interesting things, not really bad or good about the game. Just explaining it.

In the game you have 3 factions to choose from: Templar, Cabalist, and Engineer. The Templar or more your knights and melee characters, Cabalists are more your magic users, and Engineers are more your military type people. Then there are two sub classes. So there is a variety, but not a whole lot. Which is kinda too bad. With the cabalists or the engineer classes, you have the option to switch to first person which is cool. However it doesn't matter if you get a headshot or not. Pretty much just aim for the biggest part of the body.

With the addition to Patch 1.0, Stonehendge adds some refreshing gameplay things. For instance, it has better weapons, tougher monsters, and some cool quests. It really refreshes the gameplay of the game if you ever got tired of just playing through the normal game. Subscribing adds a little bit to the gameplay, just because of Stonehendge, and hardcore mode, and a few other features. I've beaten the game on normal with a friend, and played some Nightmare. The monsters are harder, and I've heard that the final boss on Nightmare is almost unbeatable. Compared to Stonehendge, the nightmare monsters are easy. Just letting you know.

I give game play a
8/10

I think graphics should be next. The graphics are pretty good with this game. A few glitches still even with patch 1.0. They've made the animations for the Templar class better with 1.0. That's good. The graphics are very nice. A few things though.

It's randomly generated. I have mixed feelings about randomly generated levels, but here it goes. This was the first 3D game that the developers have done, so I'm going to be a little less cruel. The graphics are pretty good for randomly generated levels. The characters look good, and the levels look good. But they are randomly generated. It randomly generates with a few different tielsets: streets of london, parks of london, riverbeds of london (I think anyways) underground tunnels of london, temple looking tileset, hellish tileset, and something that kinda relates to the underground tunnels of london, but aren't tunnles. It can get boring just going through the same old same old.

Stonehendge offers a new tileset though. Wilderness tileset which is sweet. There's also a marshy looking one with Stonehendge. I wish DirectX 10 would work, but it's too choppy to play with it.

I guess I'm going to have to go with
7/10

I'm thinking audio gets its turn. The audio is a mix for me. I have to say they did a really good job with the enemy sounds. I've jumped a few times when a mosnter howls or screeches. So I give an A+ for monster sounds. The music is also good. I haven't found the music inappropriate ever. The character's voices (when you do hear them) fit the character. That's good.

However, full voice acting would have been greatly appreciated. Also some of the weapon sounds are good, and some are bad. It's kind of a mix.

So for sounds I'm going to have to with:
7/10

I think I covered everything. If I averaged everything out it comes to 6.5 or something like that. Is that what I'm going to give it... no. Let me do a recap.

The Good: Really fun gameplay and cool items customization, pretty good graphics (although I wish DirectX 10 worked), Great monster sounds, great voices (for the ones that were there).

The Bad: no full voice acting, not enough tilesets for randomly generated levels, kinda a bad story (or at least it's hard to follow), some of the weapon sounds need to improve, I wish the characters were more memorable, a few more things to iron out.
7/10 maybe a 6.5

There you have it. Official review of the game. I think I went In depth enough. I rounded up because I think it's still a really really fun game. From a reviewers stand point though, it deserves a 6.5. That's my opinion.

Thanks for being open to it. My final thoughts were kinda said in the beginning. Give it a little more time and I think future patches will only bring up the 6.5 to a 7, maybe an 8. We may see an 8 someday, but I don't know if we will. I'll review it again if some patch updates the game majorly.

My thoughts to you: if you like dugeon crowlers, you'll probably really enjoy the game. Enough said.

Thanks.