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Hellgate London Demo
- Genre: PostApoc Demon Slaying
- Platform: Windows (XP/Vista)
- Published: 2007
- Publisher: EA
- Developer: Flagship Studios
- ESRB Rating: M?
- Reviewed by: UncleDrax on Thu 25 Oct 07
Official Blurb:
London, 2038.
According to legend, when the ravens depart the Tower of London, it will crumble to rubble and disaster will befall England. As man became more dependent on science, believing only in what he could define or create, ancient knowledge and rituals were lost to the antiquity of time.
A post-apocalyptic London has been overrun by hordes of terrifying demons, leaving the city desolate and scorched by hellfire. Those who were unlucky enough to survive now gather in the only sanctuary left, the Underground, banding together in order to gain a foothold against the minions of darkness and ultimately save the bloodline of humanity.
Combining the depth of traditional RPGs with the frenetic, visceral feel of first-person shooters, HellGate: London offers infinite replayability with dynamically created levels, monsters, items and events that gives each player their own unique hack-and-slash experience.
The super short version:
One of the studio's biggest selling points that the official website pimps is that this is from the creators of Diablo (not Blizzard, but several of the members of the team that created the Diablo game).. and it shows.
Lets look at a few areas in more detail:
User Interface:
The basics of the UI should be familiar to almost everyone. It's been used in many hack-and-slash style games for decades. So lets take a deeper look at it shall we?
The Diablo 2 User Interface. It has a Blue Mana/Power bar at the right, a Red health indicator on the left. In between it has your quick-select bar where you can put potions and such:
This is the Hellgate: London user interface.
You will note it has a blue power bubble on the left, a red health bubble on the right, and in-between it has your 10 slot power/item Hot Bar.
The inventory system is pretty much the same style as those same Hack-and-slash games. Your 'backpack' is divided into a grid, and each item takes a certain amount and configuration of space. This is again, how it was setup in Diablo.
Here in the inventory screen, you can also basic things like equip items, inspect items, use items, or delete items in your inventory. By right-clicking on the item, you get a radial menu with your options for that particular inventory item. One of the things that you can do that I'd like to see in the demo was the Item Improvement/Mod system.
On the radial menu you can also Salvage items into constituent parts. Using these parts you will be able to create weapon and equipment modifications to improve that item's stats. For instance, you can give it more protective value, improve the range of your gun, make your sword do more damage, and so on.
One thing they did add to Hellgate:London over the traditional Hack-and-Slash game is a skill-tree system. Each skill has several levels, and as you earn experience points you can spend them to either learn a new skill or improve existing skills.
Improving an existing skill will do things like have the effect last longer, or cause more damage per attack.
You will also notice the skill screen also contains your player's class, rank, experience points, faction standing (in the demo you can only get Holbourn station faction), Health and Power information, Critical Hit chances (for each hand), and Defense statistics (basically the amount of armor points you have).
One thing that you notice that is strange is the listing for "Universal Skills". These let you choose your handiness (single handed weapons, dual wield weapons) and your Sprint ability.
London is Burning...and I live by the river...:
Scenery is probably THE strong point of this game. The game provides a pretty solid blasted-London feel, but I'll admit that it's been almost two decades since I was last there, so I could be wrong :]
One of the zones in the demo even has ash coming down and piling up on the streets.
Moving around the world, or "Zoning" to the gaming veterans, is accomplished via the Tubes. No, not the internet version, the London Underground version (or a "Subway" to Americans like me).
The whole concept of the game is that the survivors are hiding out in the London Underground system. Lets face it, it was good enough for World-War-Two, why wouldn't it work now?
Well the Tube stations still exist.. but they've been upgraded to jive more with the semi-"steampunk/scifi/postapoc" feel of the game:
Interior scenery looks equally believable. It has all the trappings of what you would expect in a modern setting game, but adequately decayed and dirty given the circumstances.
Also reappearing is an updated and renamed "Town Portal", now in a handy dandy usable item. I honestly can't remember the name of the actual item that does it because I just called it a "Town Portal".. which is exactly what it is. You use it, it teleports your back to the last Underground Station (the 'town') you were at, and also creates a portal in the Station that will teleport you back where you first used the item.
"Wow.. that behaves just like the 'Town Portal' from Diablo!".. well Duh.. that's why I'm calling it Town Portal.
NPCs and Dialog:
Conversations consist of small dialog boxes were you get one or two short sentences of dialog.
You end up clicking 'Next' alot. The 'Welcome' dialog (pictured below), I think I had to click next like 20 times, and the dialog itself wasn't to much better then what is shown.
Oh.. did I mention you can't accept the quest without getting to the last page of dialog? Which is good because you find out what they want you to do.. You know, because most players need a 20 sentence back story, one line at a time.. even if what you actually need to do shows up on on your screen after you accept the quest. Frankly I found this 'feature' annoying since I understood what most NPCs wanted well before the end of the dialog.
The Dialog in the demo was one-way. You get to listen to whatever these guys jabber about and click Next alot. There wasn't any options for your avatar to say different things and get different reactions, or even say anything at all!
It's a good thing they don't brand this as a RPG.. oh wait.. they do.. Curses, foiled again!
That box-in-the-middle-thing isn't how you talk to most of your NPCs.. that is an even smaller box at the top-left! Unfortunately, you have to click 'Next' just as often. ARGGGH!
Knowing who has dialog or a quest for you is, thankfully, straightforward. If they have a question mark over their head, you want to talk to them. If they have a golden explanation point, the have a quest.
One nice thing about NPCs is they do the same sort of 'real' speech that you would find in game like.. say.... Diablo. When talking to NPCs, they spout off some random in-character jibber-jabber that fits with the persona that NPC has. They do NOT say what you are reading however.
For instance, In Holborn station there is an older guy that you can get some quests from, and he will say a few random crazy things. Obviously this guy is supposed to be an old coot. .
If you played the Elder Scroll's series (Morrowind, Oblivion, Red Guard, etc..), you know you can literally talk to anyone in those games. Here you can only talk to key NPCs: Merchants, Healers, people with quests, etc. Don't expect to waylay every wandering guard you see and get some dialog options, it just won't happen.
Combat, Leveling Up, and Dying
Combat is fairly straight forward fare. Right or Left click your mouse to do your attacks or block. If you have special attacks for your weapon, you can put them on your Hot Bar and use them by hitting the number on your keyboard that matches the item's slot. This is pretty typical and easy to understand since it's in pretty much game of this genre.
The bulk of the critters you encounter will be single hit monsters.. in the demo is was primarily a few various Zombie flavors with some strange demonic things mixed in for good measure.
Your swords seem to have a pretty solid reach, which makes it pretty easy to hack your way to a better you.
In fact, killing these guys is so easy, you can do it when they are behind you.. and what seems to be like 2 meters away. Yes.. Behind you! See, when you swing your sword, it swung in what appeared to be a 270-degree arc or so.. and really, anything in that arc while you are swinging will take damage. This makes it really easy to just jump into the middle of a group of zombies and just start swinging. In like 3 mouse clicks you'll have a pile bodies all around you.
I understand this is a game.. but really.. I was pretty surprised to see me dropping zombies that far behind me.
Eventually when you get a pistol.. that thing had like a 10m range. I mean, it was stupidly short for an out-door environment. And the projectile is a slow moving (for a pistol) ball of plasma something. So you gotta lead your target pretty good.
Don't expect to climb up to the top of a burned out building and pick off the zombies below you.. it just won't happen. I know.. I tried it.
I'm sure later in the game you get longer range weaponry, or you can modify your existing weaponry to shoot further, but in the demo, where more then half or your time is in an open-air outdoor environment, it sucks.. big time.
When you start taking large amounts of damage and get close to dying, every time you are hit, your screen flashes to black-and-white. Which I find better then the traditional 'flash red'.
Eventually you will die. It will probably be because you're attacking one of the 'boss' monsters.
When you die, you get an option to return back to the last Town..er.. Station you were at, pay an amount of money to resurrect right there with full health, or restart the zone as a ghost.
Choosing 'Ghost' means you you get a black-and-white screen and get to run back to your grave marker. When you reach it, you will automatically resurrect.. it doesn't give you an option to do it, so make sure when you get nearby, you are immediately ready for combat if there are baddies around.
The Demo as a whole:
My experience with the Demo as a stand-alone product frankly blew chunks. It really seems like they put minimal effort into ripping out a few zones from the actual game, removing the door to the next level, and shipped it off.
Present in the demo are a ton of features I couldn't seem to use.. and it might be my inability to guess how to use them as there was no in-game-tutorial on doing it.
What does the strange 'Nanotech' bobble do in Holborn Station?
Now that Murmur is my best friend and he told me I had urgently to get this trinket to Doctor Whatshisname, where's my quest to do so? I mean.. he wanted me to do a bunch of stuff in the start.. now he won't talk to me?! WTH? I still got the trinket! I guess I'll just scrap it so I can salvage it and mod my gun..
.. oh wait... it appears I can't mod my gun... for no particular reason... I just can't.
I even managed to get a broken quest.. see.. one guy gave me a quest to go clear into some maintenance tunnels and get him some capacitors... because zombies and demons all actually work in electronics stores right? So I go in and just clear the place out since I was there.. then I come back and notice the Old Guy has a quest.. Cool I say.. more stuff.
So his quest is to go into the maintenance tunnels and kill 3 Blood Zombies or something.. ok. I go into the maintenance tunnels.. oh wait.. there's nothing here.. because I already killed them all.. the zone doesn't repopulate.. so I got a quest I can't accomplish because I did what a player would naturally do and clear out a zone I was sent to for another quest.. GAH..
Also I didn't seem to find an ending to the Demo... you just sort of do everything you can.. then you can wander around aimlessly for however long you care to.
One thing I will say about this however, I know several people in the Beta, and they didn't encounter these issues with 'what to do next'.
I could have also likely worked around the problems I had by reloading the game, however, for a first impression, this was what I had.
One annoying 'feature' I found is if I did alot of button mashing to smack zombies down faster, I ended up activating a 'attack constantly' feature. In fact.. so good was this feature that the only way I could make my avatar STOP swinging was to pull up an inventory or skill screen. And since you can barely move around while attacking, this quickly became a problem. In the time I played this demo, probably about two hours, I think I encountered this issue at least a dozen times.
There were a few times that I got my avatar stuck on the world geometry.. but after a few seconds of wiggling around I could unstick myself, so nothing bad there. I did noticed only a couple 'floating' decorations.. things like grass that is in the air.
The last thing I have a complaint with is the default settings when I started the game were set to high. I was playing this demo on a current generation laptop, nothing to Uber, but I have no problem playing most games with decent graphics settings..
The default graphics settings of the demo seemed to be turn everything up to it's highest settings.. Needless to say when I started the game it was terribly unresponsive because my laptop couldn't keep up. After checking out the options and turning things down from the Highest to the next highest values, I was able to enjoy smooth gameplay.
Conclusion:
If you played any of the Diablo or similar Hack-And-Slash adventures, imagine it set in modern day London and in a 3D First-Person style.
And there you have HellGate:London.
There may be some branding this as an RPG.
I'm one of those people that say 'just because you have a stat block, doesn't mean that it's a Role Playing Game'. And it applies here as well. This is a Hack-And-Slash adventure. The only role playing you do in this game is clicking a mouse over and over again. You don't get dialog choices, and at least in the demo, you don't really even get any choice in where you go since you're lead by the nose to the zones you can go to.
The limited Demo and few bugs I did encounter really frustrated me as a player. I think if they put a little more work into the demo and not expect players to already understand how to play their game it would have shown better.
Also, don't be fooled by the 'zombies everywhere' that appear in the demo. This isn't a zombie game. They won't eat your flesh OR your brain. Zombie's are just used as a low-level minion.
The strong point of this demo is it's Post-Apoc London feel.. The bad part is the demo itself.
I'll go ahead and repeat that your actual millage while playing the demo may vary.
I gave this demo a pretty low 'OverAll Quality' score simply because of my 'first impression' experience with the demo.
Rating:
- Genre Feel: 3
- Playability: 2
- Difficulty: 4
- Overall Quality:: 1
Final Scoring:
2.5 MegaTons of a possible
5 MegaTons
Personal Recommendation: If you would like a 3D version of Diablo, get it. If you want Post-Apoc goodness, you can wait.
Availablity:
Full game is scheduled for release 2 Nov 2007
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