Hellgate London - Reviews @ GameOver & G4

More mixed reviews for Hellgate: London with GameOver and G4 both praising the Diablo-inspired gameplay but panning the interface and "broken" multiplayer.  From GameOver, with their score of 70%:

Ahh Diablo. I’ve got warm memories of that click-heavy RPG-lite hack and slash adventure. Was it shallow and pointless? Of course it was, but you could play it for either 10 minutes or 5 hours, and since the maps redrew themselves every game you could play it over and over again with it staying sort of fresh even. Well, the team who gave you Diablo is back again, and they’ve given us Hellgate:London (H:L), a game a heck of a lot like a game I reviewed about eighteen months ago called Titan Quest (TQ), which at the time I called Diablo 2.5. And while I’d like to give the Diablo folks extra credit for being there first, this time around they’ve made some surprisingly newbie mistakes that suck a lot of the fun out of playing, and the more I play it the more disappointed I am with the results. As a note, to get the most out of this review, you should probably familiarize yourself with my Titan Quest review – I’m going to be referring to it a lot.

...and G4, who thumped it with 2/5:

Much has been made of Hellgate’s online experience, and in theory, it’s mostly a good thing. Players gather together in hub stations to chat, trade items, show off the spoils of their adventures, and group up for upcoming missions. Then, as they head out, the whole thing is instanced particularly for that group. And then, the random level generation takes over once again. It’s not as big a deal in the online mode, since you’ll have the camaraderie of your party members to make up for the sometimes irritating level design. Plus the whole thing is free. Hellgate does feature an optional subscription service that adds options like Guild functionality and the promise of future content upgrades, but the free multiplayer is likely where most gamers will want to stay.

Put quite simply, Hellgate: London is a buggy mess. And that goes double for the multiplayer action. Crazy slowdown during battle; graphic issues where various on-screen elements completely disappear; and bugs that crash players right to the desktop are all issues in the retail version of this potentially awesome game. Patches will almost assuredly fix these problems eventually, but it’s still pretty disheartening to rip open that cellophane for the first time and realized you’ve basically paid full price for an unfinished, unpolished product.