Hellgate London - Impressions @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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:

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.

More information.

Less then glowing, but maybe the end game is where the game will excell?

But this year has been a frankly incredible year for PC games and when compared to its peers

Uhm. Is he taking extacy?

Maybe he knows something about Frank we don't know.

Maybe it will sell only 3 million copies instead of 5 million. I don't know, I have been playing on my brother- inlaws account and it delivers so far. It does have a more MMORPG feel to it than a game like Sacred or Diablo but maybe thats because the beta is not giving us any of the single player story so far only multiplayer

Originally Posted by Squeek
Maybe he knows something about Frank we don't know.

Rock paper Shotgun usually doesn't know what they are talking about.