[I hate reviewers that do not specify how far they played. I got to Act 3, with a level 22 Engineer, a level 10 Blademaster, and a level 5 Summoner - four days of nearly 25 hours of game time.]

Four days after buying Hellgate: London, I got to act three. I realized I’ve played this game before. Not only have a played this game, but I understood this game once. The game I remember had a better storyline: simple, fun and understandable. It was called Diablo 2. Now, someone has gone into Diablo, replaced the third-person isomorph with FPS/MMO, changed the names around and who writes this shit? I couldn’t figure out what any of the quest givers was saying.

Getting data about the “plot” is very difficult. Every. fucking. sentence. requires. you. to. click. Oh. Fucking. Kill. Me. Now…. hey, look, an ignore-the-boring-tedium button! Tips for game developers/publishers/writers - if you have to create a “skip this bullshit, what’s the quest?” button, YOU FAIL! If you have the same chat interface as every MMO since 1996 Forum/ICQ, YOU FAIL! If your players cant summarize what the hell they doing in a quest… well, you get the drift.

What blows my mind is that millions of dollars was spent on this game - and some serious hype - and all they came up with is Diablo 2 with a twist.

In a post-apocalyptic game like Hellgate, there needs to be some emotion and humor. Grim, passionate or otherwise. All the palladins, er, “Templars”, are just the same pansy-assed shiny twats with no emotion, no passion, and standard fare. The necromancer… er, “Summoners” are evil, manipulative and we’re-just-lucky-to-have-them-on-our-side… yawn. I remember viscerally about the emotional impact of the cut scenes from Diablo 2 - the emotional impact. The humor in the quests were… for the lack of a better term, “crisp.” They made me smile. Hellgate makes me wince at how poorly the humor has been executed.

Other than a few in-jokes (Wart’s leg), some of the names of items and quests (”Silent but Deadly”), that’s the extent of it. Not only did the dev team take Diablo 2 out of the 3D isomorph, but they took the character archetypes, and then didn’t improve one bit.

What is new are the mini-games and change of play, which is what keeps me going. The “Mini-Game” is basically items dropping from the sky once you kill/do/take damage. In a game where it’s all about the loot, this is a great concept. In a game where you’re fighting in the ruins in one of the world most iconographic cities, where you can see the left overs of two decades of slaughter… eh, not so much. The other minigames are difficult - one, you’re an anti-aircraft gun trying to take down a big… er… balloon? whale? Like a greased over-the-age pornstar, it just sits there and takes it, vomiting herpes every once in a while. The only successful change of game play was “The Cleanser” - where you remove street-herpes by liberally applying purple goop - while it was 5 minutes of game play, and extremely easy, it was fun to just slaughter with no risk to yourself.

OK, I like the game. Sorta. Am I getting my money’s worth? I don’t feel it, emotionally, but I’m still playing… waiting for it to be worth my 50 bucks. I always feel it’s going to get better once I turn around this corner and see… oh, it’s still shit. It’s my own private Hellgate.