Hellgate: Londonsprang forth on Wednesday and, well, reviews have been skewing average. Hellgate changed a bit over the years. Then there's the details of its optional subscription program and what it means for the game in the long term. Hellgate is now out there for the consumers to vote with their wallets during this cluttered Christmas. As for the reviewers, they don't seem to hate the game, but do get hung up on pesky flaws that pile up.
-EuroGamer(70/100): "Our reservations are balanced out against the obvious talent and effort that has been ploughed into the game - and the simple fact that every time we put Hellgate down, either during its extended beta period or while reviewing it, we were itching to get back to it within hours. It's compulsive, it's good fun and it's certainly addictive; perhaps as the online service evolves, it'll even be worth coming back to for a further evaluation. For now, though, this is a game too deeply flawed to deserve the masterpiece status we'd all hoped for."
-Game Daily(70/100): "It's easy to write Hellgate off as a mediocre game, but the truth is it's not altogether bad. In fact, it has some truly excellent innovations, like the item augmentation system that can imbue common items with special properties. Hellgate also has a machine that increases the level of an item, so players don't have to ditch useful armor or weapons because they outgrew them. Additionally, the game has a fantastically wicked sense of humor that comes out in the NPC dialogue. The problem is, the game tries to be a little bit of everything, but no one aspect gets fully developed."
-GameSpy(60/100): "Sadly, nothing says that Hellgate: London was pushed out the door too early better than the buggy state of the game's multiplayer. Since the game was pushed live on October 30, the multiplayer servers have been plagued by registration problems and downtime (which, naturally, results in the official site and forums getting overloaded and crashing). More problematic are a couple of nasty bugs including frequent crashes to desktop, slowdown and lag during combat and a weird display bug that makes all the character models on screen disappear, leaving the player as just a disembodied weapon floating in mid-air. GameSpy editor Fargo ran into a reproducible bug where he'd actually lose one of his weapons every time he was dual-wielding and logged off, which, as bugs go, is an inexplicable gamebreaker."
It is quite addictive. Like I said (I think) somewhere else, it's Diablo with guns. Shame that those bugs really do make it shit itself, I expected some in the beta, but to hear that the final release still has them ALL in is a terrible thought. I'll not get this for a few months, maybe they'll have it fixed by then.
I could overlook that it's a bit repetitive as an FPS given it's an MMO and you have to invest a bit of time to get the slow trickle of rewards, but I can't overlook the bugs present in the beta.
I encountered disappearing guns, fire modes swapping button assignments, random teleportations and worst of all a really clunky and unresponsive inventory/equip GUI.
I can't help but be curious about Hellgate. The concept is so good that it just doesn't seem right that it got such mediocre reviews. I hope a few patches will sort it out and tweak it into what it could so easily be.
I'd have gone for it but for the bugs - using your FPS skillzors in an MMO is a great idea, it's just horribly rushed out of the door.
An extended public beta period and a new year release might have cured all this, as it is I'll wait for the unfortunate paying customers to let me know when it's actually ready.
QFT. The grinding doesn't feel quite as apparent and the trickle of new stuff was pretty much spot on for me, but the major problems were flagged constantly by the beta testers, and it's been boxed as is. That's what you get for having EA as co-publisher.
3 hours in and I'm quite enjoying it. It's strange playing an MMO and not seeing a constantly scrolling chat window, I haven't worked that out yet.
The only problems I've experienced so far are a few visual anomalies, a few seconds of lag when moving from one area of a town to the next and one instances of the game locking up. Not great, but tolerable for now.
I haven't had any sort of problems with the game itself. I played the beta about a week and a half before it went live, and there was an obvious difference in the beta and the actual game. I have not experienced any of the problems that would want me to stop playing the game as indicated by the reviews.
With that said, it's alright. But I need to have a more powerful computer in order to run it properly!
Metareview: Hellgate: London
QFT. The grinding doesn't feel quite as apparent and the trickle of new stuff was pretty much spot on for me, but the major problems were flagged constantly by the beta testers, and it's been boxed as is. That's what you get for having EA as co-publisher. 
