After the Call of Duty 4 demo, Half Life 2’s Orange Box and Unreal Tournament 3 Demo… it’s not hard to miss the freshly released Hellgate London demo. As a new action/RPG in development by Flagship Studios, mostly comprised of the guys who did Diablo, it’s certainly been met with an air of eager anticipation by many fans of Blizzards’ old hack & slash games.

Personally I’ve never actually played any of the Diablo games, and in light of the fairly mediocre trailers I was expecting to be thoroughly disappointed by this demo. Particularly with two great, genuine, RPGs releasing at the same time (NWN 2’s Mask of the Betrayer and The Witcher) this game certainly hasn’t been prominent on my games radar. So did this demo manage to sway me into the camp of believers, or would it prove to be the final nail in the coffin for my Hellgate London experience?

I have to say the demo didn’t start off particularly impressive. The tutorial was exceedingly simplistic, with just a couple of lines of text and no narration. Additionally the graphics were thoroughly unimpressive for the performance I was getting… until I discovered that the game automatically defaults to 16x anti-aliasing, which is absolutely useless in 1600×1200 resolution.

Visuals aside, the gameplay was unexpectedly decent. Nothing particularly mindblowing mind you, but definitely not bad. Of course it all starts with creating a character, which offers a fairly extensive selection of pre-generated faces, hair styles, colours, and so on, as well as two classes to choose from. Upon entering the game you find out that it actually does play a lot like your usual hack & slash rpg, except in third person shooter style.

The basics of hack & slash RPGs are all here… but no more than that. It’s definitely a hack & slash game, with very limited character/weapon stats and fights generally coming down to spamming your attack moves and items against hordes of monsters. Great fun for a while, but personally I prefer something along the lines of Mask of the Betrayers’ strategic party combat.

Sound and Design

Quests and areas are apparently randomly generated, which might explain why every area felt rather generic with entirely linear layouts. The quests also lacked any voicework, which might not have been as much of a distraction had the characters not had generic, very-atmosphere-breaking, standard spoken lines. Don’t think WarCraft 3-style funny comments like the Peon’s Work Work Work, but rather more along the lines of Dungeon Runners: very self-critical, odd, and often downright annoying, voiceovers.

With The Witcher featuring voicework for just about everything and the same being true for NWN2’s recent expansion pack… the fact that Hellgate London doesn’t offer any narration does tend to detract from the experience. Paired with horrible generic on-click voices, and not particularly outstanding music or sound effects… it really does fail hard in the sound department.

Thoroughly Underwhelming

Overall I liked the way the demo played and the gameplay was certainly solid, but everything else about it was unexpectedly disappointing. After the amazing CGI cinematics we’ve seen I had expected a slightly more atmospheric experience, but the truth is that this game left no more of a serious impression on me than Dungeon Runners did. Certainly the gameplay is solid and I’m sure there will be people who couldn’t care less for the horrid quest descriptions and complete lack of atmosphere, but all in all I really can’t recommend this game based on the demo.

I don’t know what the full game will be like, but Flagship Studios better provide something a lot more polished if they want to survive against the plentiful, and successful, competition. Mask of the Betrayer is still featured prominently in sales charts worldwide, for good reason – and The Witcher will likely do even better, particularly after the very positive hands-on impressions that have been appearing online these past few days. While Hellgate London is geared towards a slightly more casual market, I still think it’ll lose out big to its competitors in this state… and even if the full version proves to be significantly better, this thoroughly underwhelming demo will most certainly hurt its sales.

Rating: Mediocre

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