Don't expect an especially deep role-playing experience from Hellgate: London. Flagship Studios, founded by former Blizzard employees, set out to put their experience working on Diablo II to good use and created Hellgate as a kind of spiritual successor. The result is a hybridization between a simple shooter and the hack'n-slash role-playing Diablo made famous. Once players get over its shallow gameplay mechanics, they'll find a sense of charm specific to the London underground.

In the near future, hellgates open up around the world and dark forces overwhelm the planet. Luckily, a faction of humanity secretly prepared for the demonic invasion (using a combination of technology and magic) fight back. Classes break down into the three primary archetypes of melee, ranged and caster, each divided into offensive or defensive subclasses. In total, players can choose from six different character types, each with their own unique set of powers and skills. Sword swinging Templar make up the front line of melee fighters while Hunters hang back and shoot from afar. Cabalists decided to embrace dark powers and hurl spells or summon demonic pets to do their bidding. These fighters traverse through London's vast tunnel system and even above ground, looking for a way to send the creatures back to hell. As characters level, they can either select new powers from the skill tree or improve on ones already acquired. All classes are extremely powerful and more than capable of soloing through the entire campaign. In fact, they can be too powerful, especially when a Hunter uses a sniper rifle to shoot half the monsters down or calls for a massive area attack before the Templar reach them.

The great thing about Hellgate is that players of virtually any skill level can pick up and play it. Even though the camera can be set to a first-person perspective, the game isn't much of a shooter. Aiming plays a surprisingly small role. Players just need to point their weapons in the general direction of the bad guys and press fire, healing or casting spells when necessary. Ammunition isn't a factor and the monsters aren't very smart. They march forward in a giant mass in an effort to overwhelm players. Apart from the "Hard Mode" available only to paid subscribers (more on that later) and "Elite Mode" made accessible after beating the campaign, there's no difficulty setting. Though the game does get more challenging as players progress through the campaign, as expected. Monster levels and group sizes scale according to how many players enter the zone, but there's no way to manually adjust the difficulty. When playing solo, areas and quests are exceptionally easy until a giant boss arrives to mix things up.

Even though Hellgate includes a dedicated single-player mode, its strength is in the multiplayer. This is where the game suffers from a major identity crisis. It's stuck in between being a single-player game with strong multiplayer options (like Diablo II) and being a kind of massively-multiplayer online game, and doesn't quite fit the role of either one. Hellgate's single player component is practically pointless. Gamers can't transfer their character to multiplayer mode, and online gear and quest updates don't apply. They can have the exact same experience (perhaps better) playing solo online, except play-time depends on when the servers are up. Basic online play is free, but a $9.99 per month subscription unlocks access to major benefits like increased storage, future classes and areas, special items, plus the ability to create and manage clans. Multiplayer ups the ante quite a bit, since large groups scale up the difficulty, which makes for better loot drops. Hellgate also has a function where players can randomly join up with groups, which is a convenient tool except when it drops you into one that's already cleared out an area.

Continue...