h**gate: London Review

To say that h**gate London is one of the most anticipated games of the last few years could be the understatement of the decade. Brought to us by some of the folks responsible for the timelessly popular Diablo series, h**gate has been touted as a computer gaming savior by many. Now I have been around the block and have played more “Diablo killers” than I care to remember. Oh, the bitter disappointment of realizing that each one never captured my time the way Diablo and Diablo II did.

For the three people reading this who are unaware of the game’s premise, h**gate London is set in a post apocalyptic London where all sorts of terrible creatures are roaming about doing not-so-nice things. You know, limb-ripping, spell-casting, projectile-projecting and other mean and nasty stuff. There is a nice little video intro that looks like it was ripped from the pages of a Diablo script, save for the fact that it is in a future environment. Additionally, there are a few more scenes to enjoy as you progress through the game. In all honesty, though, there is not much of a “story” to keep things going (unless you count good vs. evil and a unique story plot). But, hey, who ever needed a story as an excuse for playing a game?

If you are any sort of a seasoned gamer, you will understand the game best by the following description: it is a hack-n-slash, loot-gathering extravaganza. If you are not familiar with my lexicon, let me be more specific. You play h**gate as a character who uses weapons and/or spell casting to fight off countless waves of bad guys. Each monster you kill has a random chance at dropping something. The something dropped could be currency, weapons, armor or various other potentially useful items. You can then pick up the items and use or sell them. That, in a nut shell, is what you will spend most of your time actively doing in h**gate. Sound boring? Just see if you can stop. I mean, at 2 am , when your eyes are drying from staring at the computer screen you swore 3 hours ago you would only spend 5 more minutes staring at, just try to go to sleep. If you are like me (and I do not say this with pride) you will dream of the game when you finally do stop.

Now that I have the core gameplay out of the way, let me go into a bit more depth about what else there is to do. Firstly, you begin the game by creating a character in one of three basic classes. There are Templars, Cabalists and Hunters. Each class is further broken into two distinct categories. The Templar can be either an offensive or defensive build, the Cabalist can be a summoner using minions to do most of the fighting or an offensive spell-caster and the Hunter can be a shooter or an engineer (similar to the Summoner).

Each character can be customized for a unique look and has a variety of stats established to determine what he or she can use and wear. There are stats that affect your strength, life, accuracy, speed and various other aspects of your character’s abilities. Some stats impact multiple areas. The three things that I found I paid most attention to were life, energy and experience points. Each time you reach a certain threshold of experience, you gain a level. Essentially, the level is like a grade in school. The higher your level, the more you can do and the better your character’s stats become. In addition, each time you advance, you receive points to spend on both skills and stats.

This level building is the reason many people will spend hours upon hour playing the game. As your experience meter fills up, you have a desire to use the next piece of equipment or gain a new ability. Unlike many MMO’s I have played, the level building occurs at a quick enough pace that you never feel that a level is just too far way. On top of that, you never know when a really cool item might appear on the ground.

One aspect of hack-n-slash games I like most is the ability to customize my character’s items. Finding new weapons and armor becomes an obsession. h**gate takes the obsession to a new level by offering mods for the weapons. Mods include damage improvements of both the physical and supernatural varieties. Because of this, waiting to find the next great weapon is a bit less of an issue. Instead, you may find that you will use the same weapon for a large portion of the game as it can be upgraded.

You can also un-upgrade weapons, for a fee, of course. In addition, you can break apart most items to gain their natural resources which can, in turn, be used to upgrade a weapon. Since many weapons are specific to character type, you may find a great many you simply cannot use. In other games this would mean finding someone to trade with or having to sell it. In h**gate you can actually dismantle it and use an otherwise useless weapon. This is also useful if your inventory becomes a bit too full and you want some space for a really good drop.

While the game can be played both online and off, I spent a majority of my time in online mode. I find it wholly more fun to team up with few folks and hunt and gather, while maintaining the ability to go solo if I want. At present there are only a few servers and they are relatively stable, although I did receive a few server connection errors while playing. I generally prefer questing in a game, but it is certainly possible to battle other players if PvP is more enjoyable to you. You cannot transfer your character between online and offline mode, so if you the servers are down or you have no internet connection for some reason, you will be out of luck unless you make a new character.

There are basically two types of quests in the game, those that push the “story” and those that are merely for gaining experience and items. Being a stat hound, I generally try to complete every quest possible. Each quest is presented by a NPC in a safe waypoint location. From there, enter portals that take you into the active combat areas. The nice part about this setup is that, while it does interrupt the flow a bit, it enables you to be alone with your party in a combat zone so there is no item or kill stealing possible.

One of the things that makes the Diablo series so great is that, no matter where you entered, the monsters, items “dungeons” and goals are randomized. h**gate uses that setup so that you are never sure exactly what is around the corner. This works well most of the time. In a few instances, however, as soon as I emerged from a portal, I was met with a boss battle. By no means is this a critical flaw, just a head scratcher. Yes, the levels can seem repetitive over time, but they always require you to explore to progress. This is a welcome change from the myriad of games that allow you to use a strategy guide to make a straight line to a level-specific goal.

h**gate is nicely customizable in the area of graphical presentation. The gamer has the option of third or first person perspective and can zoom in/out at will. This enables a good perspective in the tight underground and indoor sequences while offering a behind-the-back view when outdoors. The graphics in general are very polished and crisp. Unfortunately I have not yet upgraded to a DX10 card, but the graphics looked good regardless. It would be prudent to pay close attention to the recommended system specs if you want to have a good experience with this game. That said, I did run the game at a medium detail level just to see what it looked like, and was not at all disappointed.

The sound design is certainly good, especially in the video sequences. The accents on the NPC’s seem a bit cartoony or over exaggerated in some cases and the NPC dialoguie is just too cheery. Is London not being invaded by demons? Are they not all a little unhappy that the city is under siege? You'd think not by the way they were trying to crack unfunny jokes half the time, it just doesn't fit right with the game's setting. The creature sounds are fine and the ambient effects such as water, steam and the like are also well done.

Now for the complaints, and I have a few. At the top of my list are the extreme load times. In general, a load time for a game of this detail did not bother me, but a very long load time to get to a character select screen followed by an equally long load time to a waypoint became frustrating. Along with that, the server stability was questionable when there were a lot of people around. I did find that in off peak hours the game loading was very fine, but high user volume brought the frame rate way down, sometimes to what seemed like one or two frames a second when in “town.” Also, server instability caused a few crashes. One particularly annoying crash was during a boss battle at the end of Act I.

The multiplayer seems also to be rather cobbled together right now and buggy to say the least. For example. while playing co-op, half the time one of the party could not see the other player and the only way to reset this was to go back through the portal and then jump back.

A few more minor issues, if I may, included the apparent loss of my ability to summon my primary pet after the timer had reset. This was solved by warping to town and back, but still, it should not have been an issue. Last but in no way least, there seems to be a memory issue which brings the game to a screeching halt. A quick reboot of the system seems to clear this up.

I must painfully point out that, while Diablo (I and II) is my favorite game series of all time, it was not met with universal acclaim when it hit store shelves (in some cases receiving 7 or 8 out of 10). h**gate seems to be receiving similarly (although a bit lower) rating thus far. I understand that it is frustrating to have games released that are not perfect (but what game ever really is?). If stability is the main factor in rating a game, I would agree that h**gate deserves some low marks. However, if the true mark of a game is the ability to entertain and keep you drawn in, h**gate is a semi-flawed gem that, once polished and patched, will be played by some for a very long time.

For more information on h**gate: London check h**gate: IncGamers.