Pumping Irony

Thanks to Cameron, I decided to at least check into Hellgate: London via the demo. I forget why but something initially turned me off to the game so it was never even on my radar and if I happened across a news byte or blog post about the game, it was met with a straight-forward “meh” reaction and quickly skipped. What a shame…So the demo is just a single player affair and only gives you two classes to play with, the Blademaster and Engineer. I was having a blast, and let me just say that the Engineer class totally rocks. So I quit and started reading a tiny bit of blog/user commentary. Everyone pretty much said how much the demo sucks and how different the full game is. Wow! If I’m having this much fun with something that sucks so badly, the real deal must be superb! Off to Best Buy I went!

Side note here: I really would have preferred a digital download of Hellgate: London. “But Scott,” you say, “did you not pay attention to the huge BUY NOW banner on hellgatelondon.com?” Actually yes, I did. I had it ready to go until I noticed this they added an Extended Download Service for $5.99 to the order with no way of removing it. Clicking the “what’s this?” link reveals that the EA Store only makes your digital purchases available for six months, while the EDS covers it for two years. I still think they should at least give consumers the choice of the EDS or not, but more to the point, why are these purchases not permanent? Every other digital purchase I have ever made in my life is permanent. If I have to reinstall Windows, I can just login and re-download the software. EA is only giving me a two year window for Hellgate: London? Fuck that, I’ll buy the DVD — which by the way comes in a huge, fat box about the size of two DVD movies; what the hell is up with that? — which is mine permanently.

As much fun as I had with the Engineer in the demo, once I got the full game installed I decided to try out a Marksman. I’m already missing the crowd control of the Engineer’s bots but as I level up the Marksman and get new weaponry the DPS makes up for it. Traeginn just reached level 6 and is pretty much mowing down waves of demons and undead before they reach him.

I have to add that personally, I can only play the game in first-person camera. The way Flagship did the third-person camera and controls is very contrary to how I’m accustomed to playing in third-person and the whole thing just doesn’t work for me. So unfortunately I won’t be playing any of the classes that don’t allow first-person. I can’t really think of a way to describe what’s wrong, only to say that Flagship really should have looked at third-person done right ala Gears of War or the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter series.

First Impression? Hellgate: London is cool. That pretty much describes it best. It’s just cool. It’s the cool that Tabula Rasa should have been. Running around devastated city streets killing demons, undead and other nasties is just a surprisingly fun experience. Regretfully, I have not yet been able to get into a group so despite playing the multiplayer game, I’ve been solo the whole time, only seeing other players in the stations. I really hope this changes since the whole point of buying the game was doing this with other players. I have a ton of single player shooters to choose from, after all.

Things are still shaky with the game, however. It’s not exactly the most stable piece of software; in fact in the past few hours since I’ve played I’ve had to use /stuck twice and have CTD twice, which ties with my Vanguard experience. Loading into a busy station is a bit rough, as is the loading when you go up or down a level and the game tries to pre-cache what’s coming next, which takes a huge hit on the frame rate. Otherwise the engine is fabulously fast and silky smooth (don’t ya just love small doses of alliteration?) which is darned impressive considering the quality of the graphics, lighting, and all the action.

The game does use in-game advertisements in the form of posters. There might be other types such as billboards or whatever, but I’ve only seen posters along station corridors so far. They’re very unobtrusive and don’t stand out at all, the textures have a worn look that blends in with the rest of the game’s graphics. So far I’ve seen ads for nVidia, Namco Bandai and Dark Horse Comics, as well as ads for Flagship’s other upcoming game Mythos. Some people don’t like ads in games; personally, I don’t mind as long as they are unobtrusive and if it’s the type of game where ads fit right in such as sports games. Battlefield 2142 also uses in-game ads though honestly I’ve never seen a real ad, only the fake placeholder billboards. Perhaps having the ads is what allows the Hellgate: London subscription to average $5 per month less than your standard MMO subscription? Either way, it’s a non-issue for me since I’ve only seen them in the station corridors and even then I actually had to stop and pay attention to what they said, otherwise they just fit in with the rest of the environmental graphics and go unnoticed. If the ads are also “out in the field” I haven’t seen any but then I’m too busy killing demons to bother looking.

Tags: Hellgate London