The more I play Hellgate, the more I fall in love with it. I'd sort of sidelined it, after the beta, as a distraction that was ultimately souless. As an FPS it is poor. If your'e wanting to play this game in first person then you're probably coming at if from the wrong angle, buy Bioshock, or Timeshift, or Blacksite, they'll probably deliver in the first person shooting department tenfold over Hellgate. Wheelmouse your expectations backwards, and take on the third person perspective, better still take up a tech sword, splash damage boomstick or kit yourself out with some attack droids and inhibitor drones.. and you'll be ready to take on Hellgate as the action fest it is meant to be.
This is Diablo. In the future. But with the demons. And guns. And robots. Played in sumptious 3d gore-o-vision. There are six classes on offer, which all play different enough to warrant your exploration of them. The game provides London tube stations as hubs for you gather quests and tweak your kit, with generated instanced quest locations to dive into and test out your latest action hero. The game has single player and multiplayer modes, both of which follow the same storyline, and quest progression. However the multiplayer mode allows you to group up with others. Although it offers a paid subscription for additional functionality in the multiplayer game, this is probably only something Hellgate fanatics will bother with. You get 2 character slots for single player and 3 character slots for the multiplayer game - so your average Joe will have enough slots just out of the box, to explore most of the game with the classes they want. The nutters who want to pay the subs fee, get another 20 odd slots, can make guilds, can hold more items in their stash and inventory, as well as download content that has been promised in the future.
So, taking on the demonic hoards, whether single player or solo-ing on a multiplayer server, is a rewarding affair, mainly because you get frequent rewards, theres a lot to tinker with in terms of item upgrading with slotted additions, item breakdown to constituent parts, and the forging of new items from those parts. Theres always something to tweak after each high octane blast of action. And the station hubs provide more or less everything you need for that tinkering process. You'll also be climbing the skill tree, slowly but surely, experimenting with new skills, seeing how it fits in with your overall idea of the character. I think the most rewarding experience in the game, is taking on a new skill that sounds "cool" and then taking that skill out and seeing where it fits in to the chaos of the combat. Grabbing a high arc swing of your sword that is meant to take down otherwise unreachable enemies in flight, and then scrapping with a room full of sonic bats, and dropping high arc's, to see your futuristic character leap into the air, and slash her weapons hard down grounding the bat, and finishing him in one swing.
The damage caused by the weapons can be quite specific, such as fire direct, or electric splash, so its worth having an array of specifc weapons set up to tackle certain enemy situations. Tailoring the spectrum from close panic striken direct damage, to rocket launchers that hit floating entities, and fire splash guns that lay a carpet of napalm for that added area effect, slowly gnawing away at the enemy, slowing them down and controlling the flow of seemingly endless minions of beelzebub. I think one of things that strikes you as you play through, is the variety of attacks coming from the enemies side, and the variety on offer from the player side to counter this. Theres nothing that new about roaming hordes, mini bosses, and then lovely tough bosses to take on. The areas are fairly consistent, broken streets of London, underground tunnels and warehouses, or staggeringly epic halls of hell - but a lot of the time the area adds a hint of flavour to the combat, but isn't the main thrust of the dish, its the combat that slaps your tastebuds around and satisfies you at the end of the meal.
There are mechanisms in place, common to MMO's, for travelling swiftly through the world - station terminals that will port you from station to station, as long as you've visited it before. There are recall gadgets for piping yourself out of an instance temporarily (or not) - so you can complete that quest, tinker with your set up, sell up etc. Although some instances have recall blocked.. if they're end quest lines, or boss levels. Death is handled in a way that doesn't seem to harsh, you can pay a sum of money to resurrect where you are, or you can enter the current instance as a ghost at the beginning, and then you can be resurrected when you get back your deathstone.
The game seems to have some sort of memory leak at the moment, so after a few hours play, shutting it down, your system will need a reboot for it to start performing again. There are moments of intense slow down, which is a shame. Because a lot of the time it does come across as stunning to look at, with lots of atmospheric lighting and weapon/spell effects on the go.
There doesn't seem to be an online community as such, the time I've spent on the EU server, has resulted in lots of silence, no co-operation, only one group. The grouping tactics haven't yet revealed themselves to me. Apart from melee characters get in up close and personal, and ranged ones don't. However, I can see this game being very enjoyable if a small group of friends decide to take it on, with characters all levelling at the same pace, enjoying the thrill of the action as they progress together through its challenges. Whether MMO style guilds and co-operation takes off, I'm not sure.
So, I reckon Hellgate is pushing the action RPG onwards, taking what Diablo did so well, but twisting it third person, removing the endless clicks, and giving it almost an MMO lick of paint - but with a candidate for "twitch" action mechanics on offer rather than your usual queues of special attack keys. This is the new Anarchy Online. Sci Fi action in bucketloads. But at your own pace. In your own futuristic armour. Lovely Jubbly.
Posts
