This game made big waves even before being released. Made by the creators of Diablo, this game is easily the most anticipated game of 2007. Does it live up to its hype? I can’t comment on that, because I’ve only played a silly little single player demo.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should at least know that this game is based in post-apocalyptic London, 2038. Apparently the undead have arrived in London and there’s this battle between the humans (us) and the undead.
This single player MMORPG (odd huh?) demo only allows you to play two classes, the blademaster, who uses melee attacks which deal insane damage, and the marksman, who uses guns to do weaker but long range attacks. You’ll get to personalise your character, just like in any MMORPG. Change your hairstyle, colour, height, skin colour, etc. After that, you’re thrown into the game with a short and simple tutorial. This tutorial simply teaches you the basics, such as reading incoming transmissions, how to attack, how to use the map and enter different areas. You continue on with your first quest a minute later.
This is the interesting part of the game. Its not the usual point-and-click-to-attack type of MMORPGs we’ve seen for the past 1000 MMORPGs. As a marksman, you enter the FPS of play style and you attack like any old FPS game. That’s also how you’ll be walking around. As a blademaster, you’re only restricted to the third person shooter view. Attacking technique is somewhat like Oblivion or Rakion, except that you can’t use you shield - you click, and your character swings his sword. This has definitely pushed the standard of fighting in MMORPGs one step higher.
There are only 4 proper quests in the game, and they aren’t very spectacular. They’re the usual kill “x” amount of zombies, collect “y” amount of crap. That’s how it has always been, and I don’t think it’ll be changing for a really long time. If you’ve played Diablo, the quest where you have to get the little kid’s missing leg will be very familiar to you.
By the way, the whole map is broken into smaller areas. You’ll go from area to area by entering these portals. If you enter an area which is not some sort of outpost or town, you’ll enter your own private area, unless accompanied by party members. Exactly like Guild Wars. This isn’t my information, you can’t experience it in the demo.
The graphics are satisfactory, pretty well detailed enough, but not lifelike. There’s no music at all, or I happened to have not heard it. The sound isn’t amazing, its just repetitive and boring. I’ve read around in forums that the game is filled with bugs, but so far I’ve only experienced 2 bugs. One of them is when playing a blademaster, and you click to attack too much, the character will never stop swinging. Kind of hard to walk around like that. Opening the closing the inventory solved the problem. The other bug is when you talk to a NPC, he’ll say more than 1 thing at a time, so all you hear is some jumbled up stuff.
Oh yes, as I was saying on my other post, the storyline for the demo is bad. They just ripped out a few pages out of the book and gave it to the demo. They should at least give 1 complete story, or end it well in suspense. I actually had to go online to see if my demo was bugged or whether it had ended. It ended. Wasted my time running around London.
So the full game got released today. The numerous bugs and glitches mentioned by others had better been fixed, because it has really made people go crazy.
Overall, I really think people should stop rating the demo as an FPS shooter game, but an MMORPG instead. It isn’t supposed to be a good AI which attacks you, it isn’t supposed to have a replay value to the demo, you complete the quests and that’s it. Of course, the physics of the game could really be improved. More gore should be good too, since it already has a “mature” ERSB rating. Running around slashing zombies should slice through them, or even whacking them a few metres away.
Hellgate: London E3 2007 Trailer (3:18)
Graphics: 8
Sound:6
Gameplay: 8.7
Lasting Appeal: 4 (its a demo)
Overall: 8.5
Its hard to rate a MMORPG based on a demo. I mean, if I really rate it as a demo, it really deserves about a 7 or even 6.5 or so. But if I imagine what the full game will be like by playing the demo, the above score might be appropriate.
Comments