Hellgate London (PC)

(Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate Puzzle Quest 2)
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Yet another Diablo clone comes from the makers of...Diablo?

Blizzard's one of the only creators that can sit on a franchise that's guaranteed to sell huge numbers simply because its other franchises make so much money. (EA's another one; what happened to Wing Commander? Dungeonkeeper? Crusader?)

Diablo 3 is like the Yeti -- lots of people think it exists, but no sighting has been officially verified.

If Bioshock's the spiritual sequel to System Shock (a statement that may only be true to those who've never played the original game and its actual sequel), then Hellgate's the spiritual sibling of the elusive Diablo 3. Flagship Studios, a Blizzard spin-off of some of the creators of Diablo -- the game that defined the action role-playing game -- hopes to recapture that magic. Diablo's third-person, isometric view worked well with the game dynamic -- a click-fest, where the 'immersive detachment' of the isometric view really meshed well with the mouse-button-mashing, corpse-scattering, puzzle-game-like flow. Your character scooted around and explored the environment quickly and efficiently, spotting the special mobs in the mass of oncoming cannon fodder followed by the visual eruption of loot and the not-too-subtle 'cha-ching' sound. It was not just an action RPG hybrid -- it was the hybrid of Bejeweled and D&D.

Hellgate: London seemed to promise a post-apocalyptic, magic/science RPG that had real aspirations (and would redeem the conceit from the banal Shadowrun). But rather than being an inspired evolution of the genre, the game feels like it's mixed the conventions of Diablo with the latest thing to reinvigorate the RPG genre -- the massively-multiplayer online game.

Hellgate falls back on the tropes of the genre Diablo helped define -- and that makes it feel sadly dated. Your hero succeeds where the battle-hardened warriors couldn't; despite your inexperience, you've earned the right to go on a very important mission against the misgivings of your leader -- the setup is right out of the prologue of Progress Quest. Hellgate is the pre-Copernican RPG where the world unapologetically and transparently revolves around the player. Hellgate's world feels like an amusement park for your gameplay -- despite the 'backstory' of humans being overwhelmed by the demonic hoard from the Hellgate, you, a newbie, cut swaths through diabolical minions, clearing chambers of 'horrors' like a vengeful Roomba -- methodical, mechanical and robotic. While Hellgate appears to be a shooter/fighting game, all sorts of stats-calculation is going on in the background, making it a kind of first-person version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic -- to paraphrase the 'Beatlemania' marketing line, it's not action gameplay, just an amazing simulation. But that takes away from the expectations set up by Hellgate's presentation -- when you realize you don't really need to line up your targeting crosshairs, you stop even pretending to be 'shooting' -- you're just waving in the general vicinity of your enemies. And that detaches the player from the action. There is more combat complexity later in the game -- you get to chain together fighting moves as your combat skills increase, but I always thought it's better to hook the player earlier, not later. In the beginning, Hellgate feels like a watered-down action game.

And 'London?' Never before has a real-world landscape been so unapologetically bastardized since the northernmost New York City borough appeared in Jackie Chan's 'Rumble in the Bronx' -- filmed in...Vancouver. I attribute some of this to the random level-generation, but the levels feel less Old World than Half Life 2. I don't expect this but man, why not just call it 'Hellgate?' Calling it 'Hellgate: London' seems to imply that players who've spent some time in that city would recognize it, even vaguely, on first glance. The levels look nice, but get visually repetitive. It's no Crysis, though -- the game runs well on less-than-state-of- the-art hardware.