Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1142 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Electronic Arts
• Released on: 2007-11-02
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
Hellgate: London is the first original title from premier developer Flagship Studios, whose team hails from such blockbusters as the Diablo, StarCraft, and WarCraft series. Set in the near future, Hellgate: London introduces a world devastated by a demon invasion. Players are thrust into a desolate city scorched by hellfire where the survivors meld science and sorcery to gain a foothold against the minions of darkness and save the bloodline of humanity.

Hellgate: London combines the depth of Role-Playing Games with the action of First-Person titles, while offering infinite replayability and an individualized gaming experience through dynamically created levels, monsters, items, and events. Players create a hero and then battle through innumerable hordes of demons while completing quests and advancing through experience levels and branching skill paths. A robust, flexible skill and spell system, highly-customizable items, and a massive variety of randomly generated equipment allow players to create heroes that are truly unique.

Customer Reviews

I love it!
I am an ex-D2 player and I stopped bitching and whining about games not working my way some time ago. In short: The game works. I love it. If you do not like it when a game gives you hell then you should avoid this one. The title makes this somewhat obvious.

Definetly shouldn't buy this
I was a massive fan of the Diablo series and, after hearing this game would be a Three dimensional Diablo II i was itching to get a copy. However i was soon to find this to be one of the worst games i think i have ever played.
A select few of the downfalls that make this game so bad

The Gameplay - Repetetive to say the least. Only about 4-5 different level types, and the diablo "random made map" feature isnt anywhere near as good as it only produces about 6-7 maps. Also the NPC's arent different, oh no they are one of about 20 skins with a different color and name........

The graphics - Admittedly i do not have Dx10 but im pretty sure it wouldnt be much better. Everything is more of a Blur than a graphic. Also the physics are terrible. You find yourself dying because a NPC decided to shoot you through the walls of London, which seems to look the same wherever you are (i.e places like regent street looking exactly the same as oxford street, houses, buses, cars, fences, the odd police car)

The constant bugs - .......and im not talking about the odd glitch, you find yourself jumping through levels and then getting stuck between a fence and a bus, then not being able to get out, so having to do the whole level again.

Skills are easy to bug - i myself chose a magician, and i literally bugged a skill with a freind all the way through to about level 29 where it randomly stopped

Bad game. had such potential but was made so bad.

Disappointingly tedious
I wanted to love this game. Having played Diablo II more times than I can count, the thought of having an updated D2 in the future, in London, was pretty exciting. But the problems start before you even install the game.

The manual is disappointingly short, and frankly, incomplete. Remember the lush, thick manual with D2? Hellgate's barely scratches the surface, and playing the game there are many things that you'll just never understand. What's an attack strength and how does it affect damage? How do shields work? Skill descriptions for the characters? Nope.

The game installs fairly easily and I only encountered a few freezes during play. It does seem to take a long time to launch under XP, but I noticed that it was noticeably quicker with a dual-core PC running Vista - even with a lower spec machine.

At high detail, the graphics are fairly lush and nicely done - at lowest, it feels a bit like Deus Ex and certainly worse than D2 at 800x600. The sound and music is sporadic - when the music does kick off, you find yourself thinking that something really exciting or dangerous is going to happen - but it doesn't, it's just fairly random. The sounds are ok - the chopping and slashing is ok, but the gun sounds are pretty insubstantial and unsatisfying.

In terms of gameplay, it starts off promisingly - wrecked streets, sealed tube stations, labyrinthine alleyways - but after a while, it gets quite repetitive, and you rarely see anything new. That said, the Necropolis levels are simply gorgeous. The characters are nicely thought out, but let down by the skills, which don't seem to get more powerful as you'd expect. I finished the game using mostly the first tier of skills, which surely isn't how it should work. The quests feel ok, again, to start with, but then get tedious - and there are hundreds of them. You can go back to the same NPC in some stations around eleven - fifteen times and still get more quests.

You rarely seem to get new and exciting items from quests, although the items in general do progress relatively well. Item damage seems poorly thought out - you can get items towards the end of the game which still only do 4-6 points of damage. Enemies are also poorly thought out - you'll get the sames zombies (albeit scaled to your level) throughout the game.

The game is also huge, which could be a great thing, because Diablo was also a gloriously vast game - but it just feels tedious, and you eventually rush to get through it all. Some of the levels are very badly thought out - such as having to kill ten or so identical enemies blocking a very long, straight tunnel, or having to hose down a zillion boils in one level with a very specific gun.

It does last for a long time, but that's not always a good thing. There are good points, and it is occasionally fun, but you'll find yourself setting it aside after a while and having to force yourself to come back to it. Disappointing.