Alright, so it's about time we added another review to this site, and well, you've heard about it before, but you've never had a review like this. This one of those special reviews, full of blood, gore, demons and lots, and lots, of violence (thank you Scott Sigler for that rhetoric).
Well, it finally hit the markets after being pushed back twice. And though the gameplay is fun, there are some general let-downs that normally associate game releases, as well as some bonuses that you may not have expected. This game is just like them.
Time for the lots and lots of violence. Watch this:
Now, it's no surprise to those of you who read these posts that I am somewhat of a Hellgate Fanboy. So, I was expecting quite a lot from flagship studios--the creators of this game, and a surprisingly young company that branched off of Blizzard North. Now, it turns out, that the founders of Flagship Studios, Bill Roper, Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, and David Brevik, are the same people who created the Diablo game. But well, I wasn't too much of a fan of Diablo, so I found myself sadened by the uncreativeness that I should have expected. You see, even though the release of this game got pushed back, the only reason I feel this happened was because they were too busy promoting the game with fan art and comics.
Though the game starts off with the intro video that links it to the comic series, parts of the story are changed for dramatic effect. And then, when you expect the game to start off following the plot from the comics and the videos, you find that you are thrown on some completely different task, and the quest of Jessica Summers and the templar isn't really your concern. In fact, I'm up to level 11 and I still haven't even heard of Jessica Summers's quest, but I have passed through the hellgate twice and caused a whole bunch of problems while I was at it.
While the gate has some good visuals and really simple gameplay, it loses part of the image when you find out at the very beginning that the Demons aren't actually demons at all, but a race of extradimensional beings who have moved from planet to planet in our universe enslaving the creatures they ran into until they bumped into the Knight's Templar and the general human stubborness to not become someone else's bitch. I wish they would have kept it as a psuedo-religious game with occultist undertones and strange powers that can only be explained as Godsends or as Dark Magic, but instead, it's like the beasts are mutants infused with extradimensional abilities.
Anyway, the nature of the beasty bash is very much like diablo and the multiplayer mode plays itself out like Guild Wars. Great, more time to hunt on my own and then sit around while I wait for the story to pick up or for other people to come into the town so that i can trade them goods. I guess that's okay, because the game has an ingenious crafting system, where you're weapons have slots available attachments, which give you the ability to make it stronger and have cooler effects, and you can infuse your weapons, armor and items, perminently with cool legendary abilities. That's always a nice function.
Wanna see some gameplay, check out more the violence in this one:
I love the Hellgate concept and I like the game, but it's not what I was expecting because the build up to it being a religious-themed storyline (which you get from the comic books) and because of that, I was forced to give it a C because it passes for being a fun game, but fails because the idea was lost in translation someone. I mean, why do you call them demons and wraiths if they are infact just aliens? I also gave it a C because the maps are repetitive and the items are customizable, but you begin to find that you will eventually find the same weapon for free with more options later on down the road. In fact, if you are going to pick up an alien crunching game this winter, I suggest Crysis, Mass Effect or Tabula Rasa instead, because at least in those games you have some really well done multiplayer.\ If you pick up this game, happy hunting.
This game was rated a C by the author
