Even though Hellgate: London isn't what I'd call a deep or rich role-playing experience, it does capture the quick hack'n-slash gameplay that has kept me up many late nights into sunrises playing Diablo II. My forearm still aches with the faint beginnings of carpel tunnel syndrome when I think back to the days of the original Diablo, which required one click per sword swing, destroying a handful of mice in its wake. But it didn't matter because I was hooked like millions of other players. This was role-playing made easy. No figuring out complicated die rolls or sorting through sheets of statistics. There were just our characters, their spectacular powers, tons of gear and loads of demonic forces climbing over each other to rip us to shreds. Add in free online play through Battle.net, a huge deal in the 90s and even in 2000 when Diablo II came out, and that was the recipe for everlasting success. From then on, any game that used the hack'n-slash format would get associated with Diablo.

Flash forward several years and we have Hellgate: London, a game designed by former Blizzard employees that worked on Diablo. When I sat down to talk with one of the developers from Flagship Studios at E3 back in July, he made a point of mentioning that Hellgate was practically a successor to Diablo II, more so than any other game. Despite its shortcomings, I think Flagship managed to put together a fun game that takes the best aspects of a hack'n-slash role-playing game and puts it all in a full 3-D environment. Call it Diablo 3-D: London. It even captured my friend's attention, who until now had absolutely no interest in role-playing games of any kind, but now looks forward to teaming up for an hour or so to lay the smack down on some monsters. So, as far as I'm concerned, Hellgate makes a great introductory game to ease players into online gaming.

Some gamers aren't quite as open-minded. Since last week's release of Hellgate, I often catch spontaneous conversations erupting in online chat channels, many lamenting about how it isn't a worthy Diablo III. While I believe that Hellgate captures much of Diablo II's spirit, I don't regard it as a full sequel. In a time when massively-multiplayer online (MMO) games are really taking off, chief among them Blizzard's World of Warcraft, would a true sequel to Diablo succeed? Even the best hack'n-slash role-playing games like Titan Quest can't escape being labeled as a Diablo clone. Diablo has inspired so many clones that it practically has dozens of indirect sequels, because what demon lord would be complete without legions of bastard children? What gets me is that this is one of the few games held to such a high standard. We don't label every 3-D shooter that came out since 1996 as a Quake clone, but the demon lord somehow managed to set the gold standard for all similar games to come. Plenty of people still await a true Diablo III, hoping that it will redefine everything they know about role-playing games.

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