In between marathon Orange Box sessions, I downloaded an intriguing demo for Hellgate: London for the PC. Unfortunately, the demo offers only two class choices: Blademaster or Marksman.  Question: If you’re trying to entice people to play your new IP, why only unlock the played-to-death classes?  A spell caster or something else would have been a breath of fresh air. 

Instead, I get: Sword or Gun?  Slice or Sniper. I played through as both.  Both are equally boring.  The only difference between the two classes, that I could see, was that the blademaster was in the third person and the marksman was in the first person. 

The action was also boring as hell.  (PUN!) The combat was as simple as holding a mouse button.  That’s all there was to it.  There are special attacks that you can unlock, but in the heat of battle, trying to find the number 2 on my keyboard, while being attacked was about as clumsy as it gets… Furthermore, you don’t ever need to use special attacks, because the badguys usually die with one sword swipe, or a few blasts from your gun. 

The graphics were actually pretty good.  I ran the game on Direct X 9 with most of the bells and whistles turned on and it ran reasonably well.  There were some frame rate hiccups, but for the most part the game ran smoothly.  The areas are are also fairly detailed.  I particularly enjoyed the street areas where you see alien ships in the distance, and the decayed cityscape was nicely done.  Abandoned cars litter the street, however you can’t really interact with any of it.  You can’t break the glass in the abandoned cars, or cause damage to the builidings.  Pretty, but ultimately useless, kinda like a sober Lindsay Lohan. 

As for the story, well, the only reason I knew something about the story was from previously reading about the game.  There’s no entry cut scene that I saw.  It’s just: make your character and get to it.

The demo was bare bones.  Sure, you talk with NPC’s that give you jobs to do, but there’s only four missions in the whole demo and two of the four just require killing X number of a certain type of badguy… boring.

Overall, I am still excited for the game based only on what I’ve read and previously viewed of the game.  The demo sucks.  I’d say give it a try, but it isn’t going to persuade you to buy the game anyway, so why bother.

Popularity: 1% [?]