I thought London was bigger than this...
- This title notably comes in two flavors DX 9 and DX 10. Unfortunately, I really cannot tell a drastic difference other than a notable memory leak when playing in DX 10 mode.
- The models, environment, and monsters look very nice. The armors and weapons offer nice texturing, and some have some great lighting effects. Almost all of the environment's are cookie cutter in fashion, battlegrounds may be different whenever you go back to them, but the changes aren't substantial, and feel rehashed on some occasions.
- I have had issues on both of my rigs with periodic glitches, sometimes your character will clip through some walls, or some creatures can pass through corners of walls. This is not a substantial problem, but it does contract away from its overall presentation.
Audio / Sound:
- The audio offered isn't going to win any major awards, most of the sounds after a short period sound canned. It's a slight negative, but when about 95% of the monsters, demons and creature sound alike, as well as the environmental audio it does have a tendency to grate after awhile.
Game Play:
*Single player:
- The single player campaign is pretty much the same as the multiplayer component. The major difference I can ascertain is the single player component is not updated as often.
- The story pretty much places you as the hero to save them all. You battle through multiple zones reminiscent of how Diablo 2 ran around. As you run through multiple zones you get the opportunity to do new missions, which allows you to get better as you go along with armor, weapons, ect.
- The character classes are notable in three major classes, with two subclasses within each class.
- One class is The Templar, a warrior sword wielder called the Blademaster with a high attack variation, and the second is the Guardian as a tank who can stun, and hold out the longest in a battle.
- The Spell caster called the Cabalist is a pseudo necromancer / elementalist. The Summoner can raise minions and help out party member with some attack capabilities. The other is the Evoker a high attack variant who is more dependent on spiking your adversaries' health with elemental skills.
- The final class is the hunters which are the primary firearms users. Playing as the Marksman subclass allows for you to play in an FPS mode, but you can really spam some damage around, but notably the hunter class does have a major hindrance on close in survival,. The engineer secondary allows the player a unique aspect to minion mastery. As an engineer you can put up mobile floating drones with your own weaponry of choice as long as you have the weapons.
*Multiplayer:
- The multiplayer component is a mixed bag; you have your free and paid areas. The paid areas allow you access to additional missions, and areas, PVP, and guild capabilities, to currently name a few availabilities.
- The multiplayer component is very similar to the single player, but you cannot bring your single player made character in, but you are allowed to battle alongside your friends which is very nice to have a few buddies. Be warned though, the more players you bring in the environment the more difficult the monsters will be.
- The only major problems I have had with the multiplayer component is sometimes the servers do have some latency issues with me, and a most of my friends noted of suffering from the same issues.
Additional Thoughts:
- This game was a hard one to review, I liked the concept, and I liked harkening back to the some of the Diablo style of play. Unfortunately, there are some bugs, and the style of play does get old quick.
- For the paid version of play, it is my recommendation that you do not take advantage of the pay to play experience. There is still after 6+ months still not enough reason to pay for the additional services.
- The characters right now are a sore point of contention with me. Notably the since the release of the game the classes have received some major overhauls which really altered whole aspects to play. Even though the developers a couple times offered re-specialization coins to high level characters, it still is a sore spot to a lot of players.
- With other games that offer a free to play experience such as the well established Guild Wars, I would possibly recommend engaging in that or others with the same concept like Titan Quest. Hellgate: London can get old quick