magerette
Hedgewitch
- Joined
- October 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,834
Rock, Paper Shotgun's Kieron Gillan gives a down to earth summary of his impressions of Flagship's soon to be released action rpg Hellgate: London:
More information.Firstly, while there’s moments of post-apocalyptic chic to it, it lacks atmosphere. I suspect the problem comes from a couple of places. Number one is that it’s only acceptably attractive and - in a few areas - seems even regressive... It looks pretty good for an RPG, of course… but the second you make an RPG which moves like an FPS, you’re moving into their territory and end up being compared to them. Hellgate comes off badly in such a comparison...
...Number two, it’s a role-playing game that’s just completely capitulated to massively-multiplayer conventions. While the main arc of the story is a proper narrative, when I hit the first communal area I walked away with a half-dozen quests to go to X bit of the underground and kill Y number of Z monster (Or go to X bit of the underground and get Y objects. Oh yeah - you get Y objects by killing Z monster). Yes, each quest will take you to a randomly generated instance… but it feels completely artificial, as if Flagship just weren’t trying to think of ways to hide these time-sink grind mechanisms...
....Hellgate, from what I’ve seen so far, isn’t a bad game by any measure. But this year has been a frankly incredible year for PC games and when compared to its peers, and against all enormous expectations, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Hellgate may be the season’s first genuine disappointment.
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
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- 7,834