Played on:
Windows
I would be lying through my teeth if I said that Diablo didn’t revolutionize the world of action RPGs with its release. Instead of having to worry about turn based battles and the like, you just ran through dungeons and hacked up tons of monsters. The goal? To get loot. Glorious, glorious loot – normal items were fun, but those uniques were often what made the day. Sure, your character may not have looked too different when you equipped armor and weapons, but the spells and abilities you could use often make for different gameplay.
Interestingly enough, Diablo 2 added in a ton more. The biggest thing were the skill trees instead of having to buy books to learn new spells. There were also ‘socketable’ weapons where you could put gems, jewels and runes in to enhance abilities. There were a lot of smaller additions, too, that enhanced the idea of the action RPG. Well, when many key members of the teams that worked on this series left Blizzard, they formed a new company and started work on what is a spiritual successor of sorts to the Diablo series – Hellgate London.
The best one-line description I can give you for Hellgate London is “Diablo 2 in 3D with rocket launchers”. See, here we are in the year 2038, as opposed to whenever the heck Diablo took place. London is under siege by massive armies of demons and you, intrepid adventurer, are tasked with eliminating them all from existence.
The first staple of the isometric action RPG that you'll see in Hellgate is the class system. You have six different classes that you can pick from at the moment, divided into three schools. The first are your melee fighters – Guardians are more defensively based while Blademasters are offensive based. Next up come the casters, with Evokers being the “blow stuff up, ask questions later” type of caster and Summoners calling up tons upon tons of elementals to do their bidding. Finally, my personal favorites are the gun-toting Marksman and Engineer. Marksman focus heavily on the gun side of things, getting abilities that let them snipe enemies and the like while Engineers get mechanical pets and some more party-friendly abilities. The classes are about as balanced as can be expected at this point in the game.
After you've done the whole character customization process (which isn't all too deep), you get to start the fun stuff – killing hordes upon hordes of demons. Well, demons, zombies, beasts and such, sure, but you're killing lots of stuff. Of course, just why are you going around killing all these things? It definitely isn't for the story. You see, this is where one of Hellgate's main flaws comes into play – the story is absolutely, positively not memorable in the least. Instead of taking a Diablo style approach to displaying quest text (having it sort-of float along the middle of the screen) or a WoW style of presenting it in a journal, Hellgate forces you to press the forward button to go through the text. It can't be that bad, right? Wrong – you're pressing the button for every line of text, sometimes pressing it 10 or 15 times to get through the text.
What this leads to is people blowing through the story elements of the quest just to get the part where they can take the reward. Even if they weren't, though, the story isn't too terribly memorable. You don't have any characters or quotes that are particularly memorable – nothing like Deckard Cain and his memorable “Stay awhile, and listen” line. Heck, there isn't even a main, central bad guy to rally around fighting against from the start like in other games of this type! Sure, some of the characters can be funny at times and it can get to be somewhat interesting, but you'll eventually find yourself skipping over the story elements of the game not because of the constant one line text but because it isn't all that great.
So, with no reason to play through the game for story, what is left? Well, I'm glad you asked. There's loot – an absolute ton of it. You've got your swords, shields, rocket launchers, pistols, machine guns and the like, and that's just weapons. There's tons of different kinds of armor, weapon enhancements and pretty much any kind of loot that has become a staple of this genre. There are many different levels of rarity for these items, ranging from normal all the way up to unique, with each level conferring more or better statistic modifications.
