GB Feature: Hellgate: London Review

We braved the hellish remnants of London to determine if Flagship Studios’ long-awaited action RPG lives up to Diablo’s heritage. An excerpt from the review:

Hellgate: London’s campaign takes about 60 hours to complete if you go everywhere and work your way through every quest. I’d argue that this is way too long for an action role-playing game where the story can be shortened or lengthened at will. If you have multiple classes and difficulty settings for people to try out, then 30 hours is just fine, because if the game is worth playing then people will put over 100 hours into it regardless. But Hellgate: London’s campaign started to wear me down after a while (at around the 40-hour mark when all of the enemies and locations turn into repeats), and I was more than ready for it to be over by the time I got to the end.

One more thing about the campaign, and then I’ll move on. I was a little bit disappointed that Flagship Studios didn’t take better advantage of the setting. Supposedly some of the locations were modeled after their real-life counterparts, and you get to visit places like Piccadilly Circus and the British Museum, but I couldn’t tell the difference. All of the locations looked the same (not to mention grey and bland) to me. I think the campaign would have been more fun if there had been a quest to clear the demons off the Tower Bridge, or to keep a demon from sabotaging Big Ben, or something like that. Other than the names of the locations, the campaign could have taken place in any anonymous city in the world.