To Hell and Back - Hellgate: London Review

[tmeacham]

Review written by Travis Meacham.

The creators of Diablo and Diablo II return to the action RPG arena with Hellgate: London, the first offering from their new development company Flagship Studios. With Diablo III nowhere in sight is Hellgate a worthy alternative?

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/01/16/hellgate_london_review/

 

[rgeist554]

With Diablo III nowhere in sight is Hellgate a worthy alternative?

No. Worst $50 I ever spent. I would have rather had the $50 stolen from me, that way I would have never had to purchase the game and suffer through the number, boring levels and bugs that plague the game.

If the gameplay is good enough, boring levels and creature sameness can be forgiven but Hellgate further taxes the player with enough bugs and instability to turn even the most patient gamers into raving lunatics.

QFT +1.

Hellgate is a game about gear, and while playing as the Evoker, I was dismantling or selling over 90% of the gear that dropped because I either couldn't use it or it wasn't an upgrade. ... Hellgate has a lot of gear, but I found all of it to be pretty disappointing.

Yes, they do have terrible loot. They didn't even impliment sets, and to my knowledge they still haven't. They're also working on an expansion (something about Stonehenge iirc) they need to focus on making the game not crap. If you put a stick (Expansion) in crap (HG:L), it's still crap... it just has a stick in it.

What I Didn't Like: Client instability, managing inventory, the glut of worthless items, lack of quest variety, lack of monster variety, lack of level variety, the Evoker class as a whole, weak storytelling, no option to respec, repetitive combat, the terrible chat window and poor single-player support.

I feel the same way about the storytelling. Something is wrong with a game when a main character dies and you just don't care... Also, in the beta people complained about the lack of story to no end, and what was their answer to this? Put a 30 second video of a book turning pages while a guy reads a last-minute, thrown-together storyline. Outside of that 30 second seperator between Acts... there is no development of a story whatsoever. It's just "I saw some demon down by the sewer, go clean em out and I'll give you a green item that's absolutely worthless". LAME!

Oh well, I'll shut up now. Good review.

 

[stemnin]

I played the demo, I absolutely hated it, the only good game so far from ex-blizzard employees that is good is guild wars hahaha. I convinced other people to stay away, my boss was gonna get it (he actually sorta liked the demo wtf).

Blizzard is working on a new mmo right now, we'll haft to see if it's a diablo mmo or a completely new title.

 

[thepinkpanther]

blizzard is working on a new mmo now? probably to counter guild wars 2.i hope its world of starcraft...only 2 blizzard games i liked were starcraft(greatest game ever) and diablo2. I tried sooo many times to download hellgate london but it didnt work, the game looks pretty medicore and lots of shinyness.

 

[rgeist554]

blizzard is working on a new mmo now?

They are, but to my knowledge they haven't announced what it will be. Whatever it is, it needs to break out of the stupid medieval fantasy stuff. It's ok, it works, but face it... it's starting to get boring. (I agree with the Starcraft part)

 

[gm0n3y]

I've never played this game, but from the review it sounds terrible. I'm just wondering how a game that is that bad get a 4/10 rating. Seriously, with 5 being an average / decent game shouldn't this be getting around a 2 maybe 2.5?

 

[rgeist554]

The problem was that they hyped this game sooooo bad, and if you pre-ordered (and participated in the beta) you would see how little the game changed from beta -> release. Seriously, all they did was fix some crash bugs (obviously only like 3 out of the 1,000's that exist), and insert a 30 second cut-scene between Acts. (and just added the final 2 acts which is basically the first 3 repeated) THAT'S IT!

If this was your first time playing the game (not being in beta) then this game would get a 2-4, I would think. If you played beta you would want to give this a 1 or 0 because you realize that your beta test didn't fix or resolve any issues, it was a marketing gimmick to get more pre-orders. /rant off

*phew*

 

[predaking]

yup game was that bad.

i played the engineer pet class guy. and you could equip the 'pet' with a weapon. no matter what weapon you put in the pet, the pet would 'eat' it. so even the very rare weapons that you'd give to it to make it more powerful would go buy buy. not sure if they ever fixed that.

but i am surprised at no mention of the $10 a month fee. unless they ditched that.

 

[rgeist554]

but i am surprised at no mention of the $10 a month fee. unless they ditched that.

It's optional. You only have to pay it if you wanted the monthly updated content.

 

[ryanlord]

Thanks for telling it like it is Travis, I wholeheartedly agree with you. To think that for awhile, they had almost all of the major online and magazine publications hypnotized into thinking it was going to be a top notch game. Roper should crawl back to Blizzard and beg for his job back.

 

[korsen]

I was part of the Alpha. I agree wholeheartedly (mostly) with the review, and the funny thing is, that i was bitching and moaning about all of these shortcommings in the forums (that FSS was a part of) and the hilarious thing is, everyone was yelling at me about it. They were like, why don't you be constructive and your ideas suck and nobodys going to listen to you.

They were right about nobody listening to me. And this is what they get. A horrible game that could have been 10x better. I told them they needed to delay the release because they still had 9 months worth of work to do, 2 months before release. And now here Hellgate is, getting a 4/10. It does suck. I tried to explain that to them before they tried making money on it, but nobody listened. And now i'm laughing at all those people who thought i was just some idiot.

 

[davemrt21]

I don't think they had a choice about release date. They just ran out of cash. I was part of the alpha/beta too, and did my share of complaining on the forums. I don't think us alpha/beta testers were any smarter than FSS staff. We all knew the game was buggy, but FSS probably just didn't have the option to postpone release. It's sad, but sometimes that's how the market works.

Hellgate provokes a lot of sentiments, mostly because people expected A LOT from it, and it failed to deliver. On the other hand, it delivered enough that you could see there was a seed of greatness, D2-style, buried in there somewhere amidst all the crud.

I agree that some person(s) on the design team needs to be fired. There were some terrible design decisions made. I won't talk about the bugs, since that's been adequately covered in the review. I'll start by saying the game doesn't justify its name. There is nothing hellish about it, there's nothing in there that deserves the game's "M" rating. Tilesets are drab, monsters are drab. Characters look good, or could have looked good, but memory problems mean that you see only the low texture versions, and those are horrible. The music and sound is so-so. 10 years after the original Diablo, it can't even match the original's atmosphere. The original Diablo in its dated 640x480 res had 10x the atmosphere of this game, it really made you feel like you were exploring hell. Hellgate? Not so much.

The randomization was a poor choice. It was done for replayability, but there is more replayability in doing the same well-designed level 50 times than in doing 50 repeats of the same drab tunnels that sometimes twist left instead of right due to randomization. Moreover, I think it was fluff like that which kept the programmers busy when they could have been fixing bugs or putting in stuff that mattered.

The game tries to be too many things to too many people. It has first and third person view. It has a skill system like traditional RPGs, but it also has FPS style targeting crosshairs. It ends up disappointing fans of both genres. FPS people rightly claim that it's a dumbed down FPS with no headshots, endless ammo, etc. RPG people complain that the skills are too generic, the whole skill system is not well thought out. There is little synergy between many skills and it doesn't lend itself to the broad range of variations you had in D2/LoD, where you could build 8 different kinds of paladin and they all felt different when playing them.

The game seems to think it's an MMO (or so Bill Roper says) but it lacks most MMO features, such as end game content, a mail system, auction house, etc. There's still no way to transfer items to your own alts without begging someone else to hold them for you. This kind of situation is intolerable.

To be fair, the game does have a basic gameplay style that will appeal to many action-RPG fans. Most of the stuff that is wrong can be fixed, and if it is, there is a pretty darn good game hiding underneath. However, with its less-than-stellar launch and the multitude of bugs, the big question is whether enough people will stick around and keep funding progress.

 

[korsen]

i suppose after giving it enough time it'll be as stellar as D2 as become. D2 wasn't as great as it is at the beginning either, but it wasn't as bad as HGL starts off.

 

[davemrt21]

One thing I will add to my post above is that I have lost faith in Bill Roper. I loved D2/LoD and always assumed that Bill Roper was behind those games, and therefore knew what he was doing.

But then I read an interview where he said (to the effect): "we wanted to make a game where you could pick any skills at random and still end up with a character that was viable and fun. We wanted to build a skill set where you could experiment all you wanted because you couldn't make mistakes."

In my opinion, someone who can say that does not understand the RPG genre. The most fundamental and important thing in an RPG is the skill set, and you can't just cobble it together out of a number of random skills that look "fun".

The very base of replayability is the skill set. After you have beaten the game, the only reason to re-roll is to repeat the game for a significantly different experience. The "significant difference" comes from how carefully the skill set has been designed. You can't do this when skills are random. They have to be carefully chosen, and they have to mesh together with selective synergies so it's possible to make several builds within a class that feel unique and different. You can't do this if you remove the possibility for mistakes. If you dumb down the game to the point where everything is the same and your skill choices make no difference to the outcome, you have reduced the game to a single boring sameness where you can level through half the game without investing a single skill point, and where a new weapon provides 10x the bang than the skill points. This is what is happening in Hellgate now. It was even worse in the beta, so I guess FSS is coming to its senses.

I think some of the best ideas that made D2/LoD probably came from some unknown programming grunt and management just took the credit. Too bad Roper didn't bring that guy with him when he started FSS.

 

[nictron]

I won the game at a competition 3 Months ago! I have not played the game yet!

Why?

It wont patch at all!

You cant download the patch at all!

Have downloaded the MP patch probably 10 times and in South Africa bandwidth is very expensive.

I should be able to sue EA for releasing a game in such a state!

 

[LAAkuma]

OK, Travis M. I read your review, I played Hellgate London, Diablo 2, all the games you play, I am alot like you, I like a good game and play them to have fun.

Let me go point by point on your ridiculous review.

#1 Get a real computer I guess? Hellgate has not crashed 1 freaking time for me, it patches fine, plays perfectly. I mean the way you talked in your silly review, I should not have been able to get passed any quests hardly because I would go back to the beginning. Lol to you? Not 1 crash, and I play with several friends over ventrillo, and they don't crash either? Must be your computer, which is ironic since your at Tom's and your supposed to have "working" computers to do your job. Pretty funny. Why doesn't mine crash?
#2 This game is way better than diablo 2 from a design perspective. Just the fact you can play it first person adds a totally new dimension to the game that puts it above Diablo games. Not only that, the game doesn't have the lame quirks diablo had, and is much more diverse in the way you can play the game.
#3 4/10? 4 out of 10? I think your way out of line. I think the crashes from your junk computer killed this review, because you just got overly frustrated from it. If it didn't crash like mine, and you were the slight bit rational, it would be at least 8/10 as its far above the quality of the average game out there that is released, far above.
#4 cinematics? You cried that you saw a war happen and you wanted to be in it? Dude, your such a hypocrite there! You ever play Starcraft, War3, etc, and they have the movies during the game with all the little wars, etc and then you start back on the SAME OLD GENERIC type of level, with the same basic strategy on every level? But of course, that game is a 9.5/10 with you right? In other words, the Cinematics have nothing whatsoever to do with a game review, only the PLAY OF THE GAME DOES. I mean you would think this is like a "basic" of basic reviewing principle of any fair minded reviewer. Your just off your rocker. "the game's movies didn't live up to where it placed me when I started the mission, so the game sucks" Man, your insane.
#5 the level designs were repetitive? Then you compare it to Diablo 2 in the same paragraph? And the LEVELS ON DIABLO WERE ANY DIFFERENT? LOL Diablo was super repetitive! So is alot of games. Hellgate London has more different level designs than your fanboy game, Team Fortress 2, and that game doesn't suck, its a great game!.

This type of ridiculous 4/10 review from an obvious quality game like this makes you look really bad. Its not even objective, you just whine and hate, and find every little flaw in it, the glass is half empty the entire time.

Next time, load it up on a good computer, so you can enjoy yourself, maybe you overclocked your junk too high, which is my suspicion, which is why it crashed all the time. Some overclockers live in a fantasy land, maybe you, thinking their 4 GHZ system is stable because it could run Pi or whatever for 24 hours. Then you play games that generate alot more heat because of the video card going to 90 C or something, and crash your supposed stable system.

lastly, everytime I load hellgate, and log on, and there is a patch, it automatically patches, and works FLAWLESSLY.

People, this guy Travis M. is a laugh, and a joke, and this review makes him look really bad. People that have this game on solid computers know better.

LOL again, so funny.

LAAkuma

 

[NeXs]

it's indeed a sucky game, and it's an insult to compare it in any way to the diablo series..
I for one would wish they would make a new expansion for d2 or a new d3, with the isometric view. aka keepin it simple...
Games have become too much fosued on the latest uber 3d graphics rather then the actual gameplay...none of these new games can hold a candle to d2, not even wow..i mean, the game is kinda "designed" to get you addicted to it and to suck money outta your pocket...

even now when i think back to my diablo2 time...i start to remember how much time i spent carefully planning my character...and deleting lvl 90 chars just because i misplaced an skillpoint accidentally..

i was really hoping hellgate would be as half as good as diablo...but..nah.

 

[stemnin]

OK, Travis M. I read your review, I played Hellgate London, Diablo 2, all the games you play, I am alot like you, I like a good game and play them to have fun.

Let me go point by point on your ridiculous review.

#1 Get a real computer I guess? Hellgate has not crashed 1 freaking time for me, it patches fine, plays perfectly. I mean the way you talked in your silly review, I should not have been able to get passed any quests hardly because I would go back to the beginning. Lol to you? Not 1 crash, and I play with several friends over ventrillo, and they don't crash either? Must be your computer, which is ironic since your at Tom's and your supposed to have "working" computers to do your job. Pretty funny. Why doesn't mine crash?
#2 This game is way better than diablo 2 from a design perspective. Just the fact you can play it first person adds a totally new dimension to the game that puts it above Diablo games. Not only that, the game doesn't have the lame quirks diablo had, and is much more diverse in the way you can play the game.
#3 4/10? 4 out of 10? I think your way out of line. I think the crashes from your junk computer killed this review, because you just got overly frustrated from it. If it didn't crash like mine, and you were the slight bit rational, it would be at least 8/10 as its far above the quality of the average game out there that is released, far above.
#4 cinematics? You cried that you saw a war happen and you wanted to be in it? Dude, your such a hypocrite there! You ever play Starcraft, War3, etc, and they have the movies during the game with all the little wars, etc and then you start back on the SAME OLD GENERIC type of level, with the same basic strategy on every level? But of course, that game is a 9.5/10 with you right? In other words, the Cinematics have nothing whatsoever to do with a game review, only the PLAY OF THE GAME DOES. I mean you would think this is like a "basic" of basic reviewing principle of any fair minded reviewer. Your just off your rocker. "the game's movies didn't live up to where it placed me when I started the mission, so the game sucks" Man, your insane.
#5 the level designs were repetitive? Then you compare it to Diablo 2 in the same paragraph? And the LEVELS ON DIABLO WERE ANY DIFFERENT? LOL Diablo was super repetitive! So is alot of games. Hellgate London has more different level designs than your fanboy game, Team Fortress 2, and that game doesn't suck, its a great game!.

This type of ridiculous 4/10 review from an obvious quality game like this makes you look really bad. Its not even objective, you just whine and hate, and find every little flaw in it, the glass is half empty the entire time.

Next time, load it up on a good computer, so you can enjoy yourself, maybe you overclocked your junk too high, which is my suspicion, which is why it crashed all the time. Some overclockers live in a fantasy land, maybe you, thinking their 4 GHZ system is stable because it could run Pi or whatever for 24 hours. Then you play games that generate alot more heat because of the video card going to 90 C or something, and crash your supposed stable system.

lastly, everytime I load hellgate, and log on, and there is a patch, it automatically patches, and works FLAWLESSLY.

People, this guy Travis M. is a laugh, and a joke, and this review makes him look really bad. People that have this game on solid computers know better.

LOL again, so funny.

LAAkuma

1-reread the review
2-look at his pc specs
3-understand his point of view
4-don't fixate on one reviewer's score

 

[RoadKillGrill]

I was in the MP beta and i can agree it was very buggy, however allot of the bugs have been fixed, at least for me.

Ive not had the memory leak for a while now on the MP client, I played the game only on the MP client because i move allot and use multiple computers and having a character you can access anywhere is nice. In the MP The game is saved all the time, i never lose gear for quiting in the middle of battle.

From what it seems the MP client is more stable then the SP one. I never played it on the SP client and my experience seems to be better because of it.

 

[rgeist554]

OK, Travis M. I read your review, I played Hellgate London, Diablo 2, all the games you play, I am alot like you, I like a good game and play them to have fun.

Let me go point by point on your ridiculous review.

#1 Get a real computer I guess? Hellgate has not crashed 1 freaking time for me, it patches fine, plays perfectly. I mean the way you talked in your silly review, I should not have been able to get passed any quests hardly because I would go back to the beginning. Lol to you? Not 1 crash, and I play with several friends over ventrillo, and they don't crash either? Must be your computer, which is ironic since your at Tom's and your supposed to have "working" computers to do your job. Pretty funny. Why doesn't mine crash?
#2 This game is way better than diablo 2 from a design perspective. Just the fact you can play it first person adds a totally new dimension to the game that puts it above Diablo games. Not only that, the game doesn't have the lame quirks diablo had, and is much more diverse in the way you can play the game.
#3 4/10? 4 out of 10? I think your way out of line. I think the crashes from your junk computer killed this review, because you just got overly frustrated from it. If it didn't crash like mine, and you were the slight bit rational, it would be at least 8/10 as its far above the quality of the average game out there that is released, far above.
#4 cinematics? You cried that you saw a war happen and you wanted to be in it? Dude, your such a hypocrite there! You ever play Starcraft, War3, etc, and they have the movies during the game with all the little wars, etc and then you start back on the SAME OLD GENERIC type of level, with the same basic strategy on every level? But of course, that game is a 9.5/10 with you right? In other words, the Cinematics have nothing whatsoever to do with a game review, only the PLAY OF THE GAME DOES. I mean you would think this is like a "basic" of basic reviewing principle of any fair minded reviewer. Your just off your rocker. "the game's movies didn't live up to where it placed me when I started the mission, so the game sucks" Man, your insane.
#5 the level designs were repetitive? Then you compare it to Diablo 2 in the same paragraph? And the LEVELS ON DIABLO WERE ANY DIFFERENT? LOL Diablo was super repetitive! So is alot of games. Hellgate London has more different level designs than your fanboy game, Team Fortress 2, and that game doesn't suck, its a great game!.

This type of ridiculous 4/10 review from an obvious quality game like this makes you look really bad. Its not even objective, you just whine and hate, and find every little flaw in it, the glass is half empty the entire time.

Next time, load it up on a good computer, so you can enjoy yourself, maybe you overclocked your junk too high, which is my suspicion, which is why it crashed all the time. Some overclockers live in a fantasy land, maybe you, thinking their 4 GHZ system is stable because it could run Pi or whatever for 24 hours. Then you play games that generate alot more heat because of the video card going to 90 C or something, and crash your supposed stable system.

lastly, everytime I load hellgate, and log on, and there is a patch, it automatically patches, and works FLAWLESSLY.

People, this guy Travis M. is a laugh, and a joke, and this review makes him look really bad. People that have this game on solid computers know better.

LOL again, so funny.

LAAkuma

1. This game at release crashed more than a blind asian women driving in the rain. It was terrible and it took them about 3 months to get someone hired to begin fixing this memory leaks and the constant stream of "Server Errors" that would force to you re-run and entire level. (You're in Act III, almost to the last boss. You've just went through 3 other boring, repetitive zones... SERVER ERROR! Now you have to go back and re-complete all three previous boring levels just to get back where you were and have the crash happen again.) Also, if you bother to read, he used the Single Player client. You use the online client as you say you play with your friends. I'm going to say the game was not stable for quite some time, be it sinlge or multiplayer. As I said above, they had to hire someone specifically to patch all your mem leaks / errors.

2. No, its not. First person does not add a new dimension of game play. It's just third person except your character model is replaced with the model of your weapon. You can't make headshots or achieve faster kills in first person mode, it's just there to try and satisfy the people from the FPS genre, and it failed miserably.

3. 4/10 was being generous. This game was rushed out to release and the devs were all warned repeatedly in the alpha/beta forums. All the stuff that the game is lacking - yeah, that's the stuff we've commented on and told them: "Hey this needs to be fixed." Only to receive no developer responses (or probably views for that matter). LOL. This is not worthy of an 8/10, it is far below the standard for the average game... If you want something quality, go play CoH, CoD4, Bioshock, GoW, etc.

4. The whole game doesn't feel "hellish" as others have stated. The cinematic are the only thing that give any kind of notion that the world has been taken over by some evil force and they you're all for out numbered. It provides a feeling of hopelessness and action that is never present in the game. Oh, look... 4 dumb crawlers that are throwing fireballs at walls. Scary! ... please.

5. One Act in D2 used more tilesets than were present in the entire HG:L game. When Acts 1-3 look exactly the same... that's just sad. At least in D2 you go from Plains > Desert > Jungle > Hell > Winter Place. It's at least someone dynamic. HG:L is always a variation of a sewer or city street.

 

[Pepethebandit]

I personally went through what Travis did concerning the crashing. I had to run though 3 zones to make it before the game would crash. Of course this was within the first week of the game launch, although I was in the multiplayer so seems both clients were affected. Travis when did you play the game? If it was when the game came out, why did the review take so long because the stability problems have been fixed(for me at least).

 

[robwright]

OK, Travis M. I read your review, I played Hellgate London, Diablo 2, all the games you play, I am alot like you, I like a good game and play them to have fun.

Let me go point by point on your ridiculous review.

#1 Get a real computer I guess? Hellgate has not crashed 1 freaking time for me, it patches fine, plays perfectly. I mean the way you talked in your silly review, I should not have been able to get passed any quests hardly because I would go back to the beginning. Lol to you? Not 1 crash, and I play with several friends over ventrillo, and they don't crash either? Must be your computer, which is ironic since your at Tom's and your supposed to have "working" computers to do your job. Pretty funny. Why doesn't mine crash?
#2 This game is way better than diablo 2 from a design perspective. Just the fact you can play it first person adds a totally new dimension to the game that puts it above Diablo games. Not only that, the game doesn't have the lame quirks diablo had, and is much more diverse in the way you can play the game.
#3 4/10? 4 out of 10? I think your way out of line. I think the crashes from your junk computer killed this review, because you just got overly frustrated from it. If it didn't crash like mine, and you were the slight bit rational, it would be at least 8/10 as its far above the quality of the average game out there that is released, far above.
#4 cinematics? You cried that you saw a war happen and you wanted to be in it? Dude, your such a hypocrite there! You ever play Starcraft, War3, etc, and they have the movies during the game with all the little wars, etc and then you start back on the SAME OLD GENERIC type of level, with the same basic strategy on every level? But of course, that game is a 9.5/10 with you right? In other words, the Cinematics have nothing whatsoever to do with a game review, only the PLAY OF THE GAME DOES. I mean you would think this is like a "basic" of basic reviewing principle of any fair minded reviewer. Your just off your rocker. "the game's movies didn't live up to where it placed me when I started the mission, so the game sucks" Man, your insane.
#5 the level designs were repetitive? Then you compare it to Diablo 2 in the same paragraph? And the LEVELS ON DIABLO WERE ANY DIFFERENT? LOL Diablo was super repetitive! So is alot of games. Hellgate London has more different level designs than your fanboy game, Team Fortress 2, and that game doesn't suck, its a great game!.

This type of ridiculous 4/10 review from an obvious quality game like this makes you look really bad. Its not even objective, you just whine and hate, and find every little flaw in it, the glass is half empty the entire time.

Next time, load it up on a good computer, so you can enjoy yourself, maybe you overclocked your junk too high, which is my suspicion, which is why it crashed all the time. Some overclockers live in a fantasy land, maybe you, thinking their 4 GHZ system is stable because it could run Pi or whatever for 24 hours. Then you play games that generate alot more heat because of the video card going to 90 C or something, and crash your supposed stable system.

lastly, everytime I load hellgate, and log on, and there is a patch, it automatically patches, and works FLAWLESSLY.

People, this guy Travis M. is a laugh, and a joke, and this review makes him look really bad. People that have this game on solid computers know better.

LOL again, so funny.

LAAkuma

Normally, I don't get into the habit of fighting my editors' battles on the forums, but I couldn't help myself this time -- I hate when people carry their argument to irrational lengths and begin to infer and assume things about author's experiences and then start writing "quotes" of what they think the author is feeling or what his system is running. I'll just stick with the "junk computer" part of the argument and let Travis and other folks here deal with the rest of your post. I take issue with your glib comment about Tom's not having quality computers to test games. If Travis' system is good enough to run Crysis (and it is), then it should be good enough to run Hellgate (and it is). Furthermore, when you patrol the official Hellgate forum and fans forums and read post after post about crashes and bugs, especially for the single player mode, then would you say all of those gamers have crap computers, too? Just because you and your friends didn't have any problems, then that means the problems don't exist? Instead of being negative, why don't you tell us what your system specs are and maybe try to help people fix the problems they're having with Hellgate? It is, after all, a discussion forum.

I guess you caught me on a bad morning, Laakuma. Don't take it personally -- and please, don't make it personal next time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to overclock my new PC...

 

[tmeacham]

LAAkuma,

If you and your friends are playing that means you're using the multiplayer client. I stated in the review that the multiplayer client is much more stable than the single-player but that doesn't mean that we just ignore the single-player and review the multiplayer only. I'd be obliged to argue more of your points but frankly we've seen an overwhelming stream of support from the Hellgate fans about this review which leads me to believe that... well... that you're just wrong.

 

[Alex The PC Gamer]

Travis: I appreciate your honesty when you published this review. Actually, I had ask some time ago if you guys could review this game and you (or one of your editors) agreed to review the game. So thanks again.

Laakuma: Multiplayer patch is better than single player...I'll assume you played the game in multiplayer since you play with friend on Ventrillo, which explains you not having issues. Travis mentioned SINGLE PLAYER issues were horrible...not as much as the multiplayer. Furthermore, the review is not based entirely on the crashes. It's based on the poor delivery of many aspects and did not deliver even on basic expectations.***Edited - Travis already covered that part***

As for the score being 4/10. Well I'll have to agree, unfortunately. I got this game as a gift. Then looked into it and saw the creators of Diablo I & II were involved in making the game, now under Flagship Studios, and figured it would probably have this Diablo feel to it such as leveling, the good old necromancer type characters, etc. After trying the game both in SP and MP mode, I have to say it was the most disapointing game I have ever tried. Not because of the hype but because I feel sorry for Flagship studios who ended up publishing a very poor product. I was hoping for the next-gen Blizzard but perhaps my expectations were to high.

It may seem childish but most people don't want to read the story while in a blits of action going around them, they want to hear it. Voice would have been the least to do when interacting with characters and if necessary, subtitles to be available. The mission were absolutely redundent and pointless to the storyline. Now, people like Laakuma might argue that the game still has some good to it which I can kind'of support... but if you start comparing this game to other games in the same genre, it fails on multiple levels.

To be fair, I will admit that I am a PC Shooter type player. However, i've played Oblivion which may be single player but has this first person/third person feel, and enjoyed every moment of it. Mostly, I was (and still am) a BIG fan of Diablo II. I don't think Diablo II can be beaten as a game in this genre, especially if Flagship can't come even close to it. Ironic really.

This game might have gotten a pass grade if the game came out with the latest patch and if it was released in 2004 or earlier.

 

[ryanlord]

Travis, I've been telling you for months that it's time to upgrade from your 486 processor and Diamond Stealth VLB video card. Get with the times!

In all seriousness, I can vouch that the staff here all has great equipment, with the exception of Kevin Parrish, as he's just doing console stuff for now. We're all geeks, we know how to build PCs, we like to build the best machines we can, and we push games to their limits.