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”.
So begins the legacy that is Hellgate London, the latest game released by Flagship Studios and EA Games. Made by the same people who made Diablo, you will see many similarities in features and game-play.
The initial install went smoothly onto my Vista 32 machine. Then I got a pop-up warning about “Virtual address space usage in Windows game development” and how i might have trouble running out of memory. Claimed I had not met the minimum system requirements and promptly terminated itself. Hardly a glorious start to a game. There is a quick fix you can do by running the game in XP compatibility mode, but I wanted to see a directX 10 game in action. So I went to Microsoft and downloaded the required hotfix. I granted permission for the program to bypass my firewall, and I was on my way. First on the agenda was a look at the options page. The program was smart enough to set the display to my desktop 1680×1050, all settings on high. Then I saw a directX drop-down box. It was set on directX 9, but this was supposed to be a directX 10 game. Clicking it gave me no other options. Perhaps this is a limit in the demo, but I would have liked to take some screenshots for comparison. Anyway, on to the game.
A character create screen appears, giving you control over the appearance of your character. Nothing special here, just your basic hairstyle, skin color, and body type. The demo limits your class choices to blade-master or marksman. 
(Click image to view full screen)
Jumping right in, I expected the typical RPG interface. Instead, you play in more of a FPS mode, with a crosshair on the screen instead of a mouse cursor. Rather than click on a skill to use it, you press the hotkeys 1-9 and the move is executed immediately. I fumbled around a bit but soon got the hang of things. Killing the zombies was almost too easy. One swing of my sword and they were dead. Here you see a semi-transparent zombie slowly headed my way. Hope you like transparency, because almost everything in the game including your character is semi-invisible. (EDIT: I’ve since found out this transparency isn’t actually meant to be there, merely one of many reported glitches.) Notice in the screenshot you have to put your crosshair on the invisible mob to activate a pop-up telling you what it is.
(Click image to view full screen)
Next up is the inventory screen. Here again, the transparency gets annoying as you have to mouse over to tell one item from another. Drag and drop the items you want into their proper gear slots. Items have level, class, and stat requirements. Familiar stuff for most game players.
(Click image to view full screen)
Two issues I encountered on the inventory screen were how to split item stacks, and how to get rid of old items once I ran out of inventory. Splitting items turned out to be a non-issue, since nothing stacked that needed to be split. As for removing items, I haven’t found any stores yet to sell items. (Rumor has it there was one, but was probably invisible to me on my system) Instead you right click on the item and a pop-up appears giving you options to view details, destroy item, or break the item down into components. Breaking it into components is what you want to do, because it gives you resources to further upgrade your items. Using a machine similar in function to the Horadric Cube, items gain in power. Below is a sword before and after upgrading.
Overall I gave the game a C+ rating. It’s much better than Diablo clones like “The Chosen: Well of Souls”. At least you got the feeling here that they tried to make a quality game. There is plenty of creativity, character development, and atmosphere throughout the game, not to mention good old hack and slash fun. However, how many more levels are going to be based upon a deserted street with a subway station ? Even with the limited demo it was getting a bit old. Secondly, I had a few technical issues. The above mentioned required Microsoft hotfix. It’s not a suggestion to install it, it’s a demand. Also, my sound kept crapping out soon after loading a level. This may be more of a Creative Audigy 2 issue being incompatible with Vista than a fault of the game, but no other title gave me this many headaches. Below are a few more screenshots showing Wart’s Leg (is there a secret cow level?) and a low level boss.
(Click image to view full screen)
(Click image to view full screen)
|
|
|
|
|
|
13 users commented in " Hellgate London Demo Review "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback **********the character and mobs transparency it’s a problem of your configuration or maybe a setting, in my demo, on xp and nvidia card everything is perfectly visible.
what kind of review is this?
get decent a decent rig before u test one of the latest games, this demo works flawless on my machine, no graphical glitches at all
quick load times, and high frame rates, fast gameplay, it reminds me a lot of the diablo series
I have a nvidia 8800, 3gb ram, C2D cpu, 680i motherboard. Hardly need to “get a decent rig”. I didn’t change any configuration options. The settings I used were those the game installed by default. I also tried the game in DirectX9 compatibility mode and had the exact same sound and transparency issues.
It could be particular to my machine, but I have not had any issues in any other games. Sound, video, or otherwise. Load times and gameplay are just fine.
The beta works fine with directx 10 enabled.
Edit: I found this link which gives fixes for the few errors I experienced, as well as quite a few more.
http://www.gamingnewslink.com/2007/10/20/hellgate-london-demo-error-and-bugs-fixes/
i got the demo and im hoping the game will be a bit better.
and it does get a bit old, station -> street -> station -> maintenence tunnel -> street and so on. but then again, this is only the demo, and single player……
I liked the demo. Have a 3 year old machine with 512mb ram, nvidia 6600 128mb card, winxp and it ran without a problem on 1280×1024 medium settings. No transparency issues like the screenshots above(that would hack me off). I did think the demo was easy but its a demo and I’ll buy it this month when it comes out. Not so sure I’d pony up the cash for premium monthly service.
Hated it and i totally agree with you. I would give it a C and trash about even more stuff.
1st, the moment i found out that i was restricted to just 2 classes in the demo, things were off to a bad start. If you’re intention was to show of the gameplay and how “non-awesome” and “non-diverse” it was, Flagship studios definately nailed it. You’re marketing an MMO with a demo that has no mutliplayer? Right….
2nd, whilst D1 and D2 were amazing not just because of the plot/eye candy, they were also pretty well polished and just generally well executed down to the little details. There was nothing that was even remotely innovative nor refined in the demo however. The most obvious bump was the tutorial tips, which were big, smack in the middle of the screen, annoying, and not very informative.
3rd, Combat was really easy and didn’t really show off what the game was capable of, this might sound like a repetition of point 1, but more than that, as the others have noted, the whole subway-station-station is going to get old, especially when you can breeze through it without so much as using a potion.’
In conclusion, interesting concept, but very poor execution and too much repetition. Whilst D2 got the look and feel right, HGL seems to stumble, most notably to me in the UI area, and furthermore, there just seems to be too much repetition in the game and the “boss” fights rather non-rewarding.
Agree with Haracas “mostly” (insert Aliens reference if you must), but the time Turnip took to give this a decent review is rewarding. My cadre plays Titan Quest, D, D2, etc., so we had very high hopes for this game. What a dissapointment. Now, 2 classes to choose from, no brainer - it’s a demo so I am cool with that. Street, tunnel, station, street - yeah, that got boring but it’s a demo. To Haracas’ point - a demo should “show off’ what it can do. What a bust here, as nothing was accomplished. The game was mundane, nothing flashy, and quite frankley I though maybe, just maybe I was back to playing RoTT or forbid - Duke Nukem. If you don’t belive me, take a stoll on the street, look in the windows, and look at the recurring “alley” that are the same except maybe an o2 bottle or valve here and there. Anyone remember the demo of Guild Wars, or Prey? Now THOSE were DEMO’s. This? Jury is out I think, but C+ may be a little plenty, C- maybe. $19.99 - for sure. Retail? not in this demon realm. Lastly - thease are opinions - not “yours”.
I’m happy I didn’t have any glitches with the demo in Vista, but it was pretty obvious from the beginning that this wasn’t as great as I had hoped. Looking at the ‘windows’ on some buildings showed reflections of stuff that was nowhere on the level, much less within any line of site that would have produced those reflections - wtf?
It’s generally pretty and is entertaining enough to play if it’s $20 or less - but going from zombies that can’t even get near you to boss monsters that are all over you with nothing in between is a balancing mistake that seems to creep into too many games.
Wasn’t the kid who needed a leg in D2 called Wirt? Hmmm…
If it’s $20 I’ll grab it - the demo showed it’s defintely worth that. It does seem to be missing something, though…and the repitition is a bit much, even though it has that familiar ‘home base’ concept from the Diablo series.
This demo put me off from pre-ordering the game, I guess I’ll just wait for reviews of the actual game before I even think about buying it again.
It is a DEMO, folks! This was cut from the gold path several weeks ago; lots of improvements since then. So, you are all clairvoyant and can see the future thus you know exactly how the game will be when it is shipped?! What a bunch of whiners.
Well if that demo was the best idea on how to reel people in, it clearly didn’t work. Couple that with the BS subscription plan, and I don’t think that this game is gonna be a clear winner. Hope I’m wrong, but that’s just the feeling I get.
The demo’s color was just plain all grey. Pretty much no other color visible. Identical streets. My goodness, and how long did they work on this?
The demo works fine. I had no transparency issues nor any of the graphical errors that you had. The demo is not designed to be run in DX10. The 1st person view is mainly for the Hunter, there is an option to switch to 3rd person as seen in many of the videos online. Both you and some people who posted comments need to keep in mind that this IS a demo…
On the comments of there only being 2 classes. The final game will have 6 classes available to the non-subscribers. There are only two available because if they gave you access to all the classes, they may as well give the the damn game for free. And yes, the fact that they are going to charge a monthly subscription fee sucks. I personally hate games that do that. Luckily there is an option for all of use cheap folk (including me =D). We still get the normal stuff in the game. The subscribers just get “additional bonuses” (Translated: Crap I don’t need to have fun).
On the issue of combat and whatnot. The combat in the demo is SUPPOSED to be easy… The Zombies are designed to be the lowest level enemies of the game (the basic zombies that is). I have yet to see a zombie that DOESN’T die from being hacked apart by a large sword. So I don’t see an issue with the zombies being able to be killed in one hit. I played as a Hunter, and it takes several rounds (Anywhere from 2-5) to put down one. That sounds reasonable given that I was level one and that in popular fiction zombies are typically able to withstand several rounds.
While the demo does disappoint me in several areas (The fact thats it’s single player?). We must try to keep in mind that this is after all a DEMO. Also note that the beta recently finished and they will have probably cleaned up many of the issues seen in the demo. I don’t think they had the demo designed so much to reel people in but rather with the same purpose as the beta (Finding issues). Well, I’m probably not going to pre-order, but I definitely think that this will turn out to be at least relatively sucessful.
“Remember the dead, BUT FIGHT FOR THE LIVING!”
I’m going to London!! XP
Patch 2.0, The Abyss Chronicles for Hellgate: London, going to be out one of these months soon.
Leave A Reply