From Hellgatewiki.com

An archived Hellgate: London feature. See the Hellgate Archives for more.

Feature: Hands on gameplay report by Swordfish.
Date: June 14, 2007
Source: GX League.

Gameplay Report

Managed to get some alone time with the latest build of Hellgate: London at the Hellgate: London Asia Launching Party that took place in Seoul, Korea on the 31st of May 2007. The game was played on large 22 inch LCD monitors and wow, did the game look great!

I made my way over to the English trial section of Hellgate: London at the Hellgate: London Asia Launching Party and waited till one of the terminals were free. Fortunately for me, most of the visitors to the Party were Korean and were more interested in the Korean version and were therefore crowding the Korean trial section.

On my first go, I continued playing a Guardian character the person before me was playing. Was fairly lost as I did not know which parts of the beginning few portions of the game he had already done, so was just running around blindly hacking and slashing at various zombies and demons.

If you are expecting something similar to the combat mechanics of Diablo or Diablo II, where you click on a monster to attack it, throw it out the window. In Hellgate: London, for melee characters, clicking the attack button will cause your character to hack and slash. As for actually hitting monsters, you must be looking and facing in the direction the monster is in, and it has to be in range of your weapons, before the monster will actually be hit.

This requires slightly more skill than what old school Diablo or Diablo II players are used to. Gamers used to third person hack and slash games like Oblivion and Prince of Persia, and will be quite familiar with this new system. However, unlike games like Prince of Persia, where there is a function that auto faces you to your enemy, you have to manually control your facing in Hellgate: London with the mouse. Making frenzied sweeps of the mouse while frantically clicking the attack button is fairly common when a large number of enemies attack you from multiple fronts.

Wanting to try something different, I created a Hunter Marksman next to try out the first person shooter (FPS.) elements of the game. The character creation has quite a lot of options, allowing you to customize the hair style and colour, face type, body height and body mass.

For classes that use the FPS element like the Marksman, they can be played both from a first person and third person perspective. Both control similarly with the exception that in third person, you have a slightly wider field of view and are more aware of your character and its surroundings.

The Marksman class in first person view plays just like any of your typical FPS games. Similar to most tactical FPS games, the aiming reticle increases in size the more you move around or the more you hold down the fire button if you are using a full auto weapon. This forces you to actually stop to aim and make your shots count, rather than spray and pray.

As you progress through the game, there will be a lot of drops to collect, both from the monsters that you kill, as well as from chest and random boxes (Like the barrels in Diablo and Diablo 2.). In fact, most of the time there will be so many drops that your inventory will not be able to contain them all. Most of the drops are usually similar low level equipment however, or equipment that cannot be used by your class, cluttering up your inventory till your next safe zone stop to sell them all for cash.

The character progression is fairly fast and I was level 6 in no time as my brand new Marksman went through the initial levels. For each level, you get a certain number of attribute points that you can spend for 4 attributes, Accuracy, Concentration, Stamina and Willpower. Stamina and Willpower are your basic health and mana attributes, increasing those will increase your base health and mana pools. Accuracy and Concentration are the more skill based attributes, increasing the Marksman's Accuracy meant that the targeting reticle will get smaller, reducing the spread of projectiles and thereby increasing his accuracy.

Also when you level up, you can choose a skill to train, every class have different skills that they can level up or new skills they can learn. The skills follow a tree where certain skills are required before advanced skills can be learnt. I tried out the Marksman's grenade skill and had fun with the physics as I lobbed grenades around.

Overall, the game is looking more polished the closer it gets to beta. A pity I did not get a chance to try out the multiplayer functionality though.