Game Play: Hellgate Demo

I got a little time before falling into a deep sleep last night, right after catching up on NaNo from the weekend. So I loaded up the Hellgate: London demo and took it for a spin.

The good - Hellgate looks darn good and plays with only the occasional hiccup on my mediocre CheapBox++ (2GB Ram, P4, 7600GS). I think it skipped some dynamic lighting and other fancy features, but I don't feel like I'm missing much.

The sorta good - if someone described Hellgate as a "third person, 3D Diablo" ... they did a good job. Hellgate follows Diablo's run and click gameplay pretty tightly. So if you found that to be your cup of tea, the demo is definately worth the demo.

The I hope they fix this - Don't get me wrong ... I love the theme. The combination of horror elements, modern architecture and a weird mix of sci-fi fantasy really pays off. They just need to fix it. For instance, I try talking to a ... techsmith I think it was? And his voice dialogue is all about how wonderful it is to talk to me and ooo baby and ... I don't know. It was creepy, didn't match the actual text of the conversation and totally killed the mood for me. Other NPC's were similarly off-putting.

The I know they won't fix it, but I wish they would - I don't know if I've ever been a huge fan of Diablo's skill trees and wish they would come up with another mechanism. Honestly this setup has only really worked for me when playing these kind of RPG's on the PS2 and I don't want to bother with any kind of complexity and there was a high chance of replayability. On the PC, it just feels like I'm either a) wasting time experimenting with skills I don't know or b) waiting for someone else to figure out the most powerful routes and mimicking what they do.

I give it a tentative thumbs up, and the online play might put it over the edge there (though I have no idea when I'd have time to actually play it). I'll definately bleed the demo dry before making a purchase.