Hellgate opinions?

The "professional" sites have turned in disappointed reviews overall, but I have yet to find a pro site that shares my sense of "good". So I was hoping a few folks around here were playing the game and might share an opinion or two. I'm only interested in the single player experience, so a focus on that content would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance to anyone that has something to offer. I was really excited about this game about 2 months ago, but the pre-release emphasis (hype-wise) on multi-player aspects and the early reviews have me nervous.

Accurately describing Hellgate with words is kinda hard, I highly recommend giving the demo a try.

Some people here will tell you that it's nothing more than a Diablo 2 clone, but that's a load of bunk imo. It's certainly nothing revolutionary, but I found the setting and storyline to be interesting enough. The action oriented combat and FedEx style quest are standard stuff.

I think it will be a victim of bad timing though, with so many promising games being released this month. I know I didn't buy it for that reason, I'm already overwhelmed with too many games right now.

I liked the beta (I think the FPS style shooting with marksman did it) and bought CE from US. F13.NET (oldstyle mmog ranting site) is liking the game too, youll find lots of opinnions/info there. Theres atleast 2200 posts about it and they made their own board for it even:
http://forums.f13.net/index.php?board=76.0

My mag gave the game 84% which is kinda generous considering the bugs. The game is in bad shape. Id say unless you are wanting teh CE with 106 pages of graphic novel, delay the purchace until they fix the game. Theres no sense playing unfinished game that has literally gamebreaking bugs. They have even made false credit card charges due to the spaghetti-status of the accounting system.

It's a rock solid hack'n slash action game. If that is what you're looking for (looting, killing, character building), then Hellgate: London is a game for you. If you're looking for something else, you should probably look elsewhere.

I personally enjoy it quite a bit, the combat is good fun and a nice change from the tactical combat in The Witcher. It's all about customizing the character and killing stuff with the powerful character you create.

I agree Maylander - it is mindless hack-n-slash, nothing more. I need more time to form a solid opinion, but so far it is OK.

So what sort of hack-n-slash experience are we talking? I'm up for a nice passive level grinder ala Dungeon Siege 2, but I don't have much interest in a twitch game even if it's got character building and phat lewt. Bioshock was enough of a twitch experience to satisfy me for another few years (my last twitch game was Half Life GotY, which should give a fair impression of my appetite for that sort of game). That's part of what scares me about the demo. Since the Marksman class is supposed to turn Hellgate into a FPS experience, I don't want to touch that. I guess the best way to put it is that I'm willing to mash an attack key half a million times, but I have no desire to aim and time attacks and strafe duck parry roll thrust dodge.

If you dont like FPS experience you can play on of the melee classes. They are played from the 3rd person perspective. Allthough its still twitchyish- there is no autotarget/autolocking/autoattack/stand next to the enemy and press buttons 1-10 in different patterns for special moves. :/

In the vast majority of games, I play with a sumo mentality. I march up to the bad guy, we offer a prayer to the North- and South-going Zax and set our feet, we beat the crap out of each other, he dies, I heal up, and on to the next bad guy. I don't strafe. I curse the invention of strafing in combat- I don't care if it's realistic or not. There's actually a fair bit of tactics to proper sumo-RPGing, but in the end the actual mechanics of the combat are incredibly simple, which suits my simple mind quite nicely. I believe there's a class in HG:L reasonably well suited to the sumo approach (not included in the demo, IIRC) but if the mechanics of combat entail more than 3 keys, I'll probably get frustrated with the game. There's been much said about the game playing very different for different classes, so I don't know that I'll really get a good taste of the mechanics I'll be using by playing the FPS-centric Marksman class in the demo.

Well you certainly won't beat any of the bosses in HG:L with that approach, just thought I'd let you know.

I suggest you play one of the Templar classes then, they become extremely good in melee combat, and can butcher most things without any problems. However, as JDR pointed out - the bosses are tough. Some of the bosses later in the game are, in fact, very tough. So tough you'll probably die 10+ times over trying to defeat them. The good news is, there is no penalty for dying, other than having to run as a ghost to find your corpse (like WoW), or pay a price. Not a lot of load times and so on, so dying is much less of an issue than in most games.

All in all it's good fun though, but some bosses may be a tad too hard, especially if you (like me and dte) like to march up to stuff and start whacking.