Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Highly addictive"

There's definitely some serious lack of polish on almost every corner in Hellgate: London. The NPCs look blunt, all dialogs are text-only and the few voice acting which is nothing more than some random phrases at the beginning and end of a dialog are neither funny nor authentic. The story isn't catching and there's no way to influence it. The hardware requirements are too high for what you get to see.

Then there are some things that were realized in way they're fulfilling their purpose but without setting new trends or being any better than the implementations of the competition. For example the character creation function works just fine but could be a lot better. The design of the monsters and the world is sufficient and ranges from great to repetitive. The sound score is fine but kicks in too infrequently. Leveling up your character could be a little bit faster or more rewarding but it does the trick.

And at the end there's this one thing that makes up for all the rest of the errors and flaws, which is the fun one can have by playing this title. There are so many titles out there that try to achieve this with lots of manpower and technical finesse that they forgot what playing games is all about: fun. Flagship Studios somehow managed to direct all those mediocre aspects of their game into something compelling which makes you go on.

You're barely punished and almost always rewarded such as when you die, you can respawn a the beginning of the level and when you slay monsters you get more items than you can handle. Items aren't in your way either as you can always disassemble them to use the resulting parts for forging new items. Of course they can also be used to upgrade existing items to a new 'level'. Upgrading doesn't end here though because you can find and forge upgrade parts which fit into certain slots of the item giving them special properties.
Obviously a lot of depth is drawn from collecting and upgrading items, looking for monsters and chests providing them.

The replay value is immense due to its random nature generating items and even levels as needed. Starting a new character class yields a completely different experience as well because you get to use other kinds of weapons and skills. For example, after switching from 'guardian' beating up monsters with your sword from a 3rd person view you'll find yourself sharpshooting from 1st person view if you play as a 'marksman'.

With patch version 1.4 many annoying issues are gone and a lot of enhancements were introduced which makes it all the more worth playing. But even if they'd triple their workforce to produce the perfect Hellgate: London I highly doubt it would be any more fun than it already is.