PREVIEW: Hellgate: London (PC)
- Scribbled on October 19th, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Game Demos, PC, Previews, RPG
If you’re like me, you eagerly downloaded the 1.45GB demo of Hellgate: London, expecting a spiritual successor to Diablo II. In essence, that’s what Hellgate is, but for a different reason:
Hellgate: London is a spiritual successor to World of Warcraft. If you never played Diablo II (hah!), you might think Hellgate was trying to be a “massively single player online roleplaying game”, or what World of Warcraft would be if you could play it alone. From the yellow ! and ? hovering above NPC’s heads, to the loot, to the skill tree, to the graphic style, it screams WoW.
But that’s just because WoW took a page - well, a whole phone book’s worth of pages - from Diablo II, mimicking the central theme - getting colored loot, building new items, and simple interface/complex strategy gameplay, arising in part from the complex skill tree that Diablo II boasted.
The gameplay seems simple, just like Diablo II did - hack-and-slash mouse clicking. However, as the enemies grow more powerful, you start relying on the character’s skills, and a major chunk of the strategy is deciding how you “spec” your PC as they advance in levels.
The demo only provides a little hint of the game to come, and already it seems like it’s going to be crack cocaine addictive gameplay - which will probably become that much more enticing when played online with friends.
Rejoice, for World of Diablo is here.
October 21st, 2007 at 11:11 pm
I’m actually quite excited about this game. Since Blizzard refuses to do anything more than milk the massively overdeveloped breast of WoW’s user base… Good thing ex-pats from them made Hellgate.