01.09.2007 HELLGATE LONDON: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I hopped on one of the three PCs running this game and picked up where the last player left off. Playing as a typical manly man, I was in a depressing wasteland area with cracked mud textures covering the ground. I was surrounded by not only tall stone cliffs trapping me in the wasteland, but also by numerous demon like monsters coming straight at me from all directions. There's a disesed fat man, several burned flesh, upright demons ranging in all sizes, and small, spiky demons crawling along the ground. Talk about slaughter - I killed a dozen oncoming enemies in seconds, receiving hardly any damage. The game seems to be strictly point and click, unlike what I just talked about with Age of Conan, but for such detailed and shiny monsters, that's a whole lot going on screen at once. And thankfully, instead of looting each fallen corpse, the discarded loot all floats into your inventory.
The characters themselves though are somewhat disappointing from what I saw. I was obviously not a leveled up powerhouse, but for a MMO FPS game I would expect more then just attack and shield animations to choose from early on. The particular area I was in didn't seem to have a solid theme - was just a whole lotta fuckin' unrelated demons trying to kill me in a barely hilly area. I noticed several other character players in the game, and also noticed that many different characters looked similar, so I exited the game and restarted so that I could check out the player creation system.
Before loading up the character creator area, I noticed through several menus that the game has a heavy amount of orange-blue artwork that sets the dark, yet firey mood of the game. The character creator system finally loads up and offers three character classes to choose from, each including both male and femal options: cabalist, hunter, and templar. I start to tweak the weight and height modifiers and notice that the body shape altering bars include a significant amount of change without ever looking inproportianate and goofy. The skin color changer has a wide variety to choose from, but doesn't include bold and unnatural colors that many will surely miss not having for their characters. The face modifier is just okay in its amount of different choices, but the worst by far is the hair modifier. Of all the things about a face to define who someone is in appearance to someone else, a person's hair is the most memorable. Yet, Hellgate London only offers a few different hairdos and corresponding facial hair sets to choose from.
The people who are making this game are part of Flagship Studios, some of which worked on the original Diablo game. With currently 44 people working for the game team, Flagship Studios plans to release this game in summer later this year. This is definitely one of those games that needs to show off more gameplay and gameplay areas. Crysis automatically has an immediate amount of attention and attraction to it, but Hellgate London has a lot to prove if it wants to be a successful seling MMO FPS game.
The characters themselves though are somewhat disappointing from what I saw. I was obviously not a leveled up powerhouse, but for a MMO FPS game I would expect more then just attack and shield animations to choose from early on. The particular area I was in didn't seem to have a solid theme - was just a whole lotta fuckin' unrelated demons trying to kill me in a barely hilly area. I noticed several other character players in the game, and also noticed that many different characters looked similar, so I exited the game and restarted so that I could check out the player creation system.
Before loading up the character creator area, I noticed through several menus that the game has a heavy amount of orange-blue artwork that sets the dark, yet firey mood of the game. The character creator system finally loads up and offers three character classes to choose from, each including both male and femal options: cabalist, hunter, and templar. I start to tweak the weight and height modifiers and notice that the body shape altering bars include a significant amount of change without ever looking inproportianate and goofy. The skin color changer has a wide variety to choose from, but doesn't include bold and unnatural colors that many will surely miss not having for their characters. The face modifier is just okay in its amount of different choices, but the worst by far is the hair modifier. Of all the things about a face to define who someone is in appearance to someone else, a person's hair is the most memorable. Yet, Hellgate London only offers a few different hairdos and corresponding facial hair sets to choose from.
The people who are making this game are part of Flagship Studios, some of which worked on the original Diablo game. With currently 44 people working for the game team, Flagship Studios plans to release this game in summer later this year. This is definitely one of those games that needs to show off more gameplay and gameplay areas. Crysis automatically has an immediate amount of attention and attraction to it, but Hellgate London has a lot to prove if it wants to be a successful seling MMO FPS game.
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