Hellgate Global is an interesting concept: Take the dungeon crawling of Diablo, combined with the random item combination drops of Diablo, throw in some role playing elements, toss in guns, and place it in the setting of post-apocalypse battle against hell. If the box price and subscription fee was a bit too unnerving when Hellgate had its first run, you certainly don’t have any excuse now that the game is free to play. So if you haven’t picked up this title yet, read on.
On the hole, Hellgate is something of a free to play’ers dream, a game where all content can be accessed without paying a dime. As of this writing, there are two roadblocks. The first, around level 16 to access Act 3 and onward, and the second to access Hellgate: Tokyo after Act 5. While you can go ahead and buy the tickets for real cash ($6 total), Hanbitsoft allows players to sell tickets on the auction house, meaning if you can grind the palladium needed for the tickets, you can get through all of the content for free. Personally, I buy packs of auto-dismantlers, a convenience item that breaks down my loot drops so I don’t have to go through every few minutes and do it myself, on the auction house for around eight thousand palladium for packs of fifty. I think I save about five cents per purchase.
As far as the game itself goes, Hellgate is a hub quester. You start at hub one, complete quests, eventually those quests take you to hub 2, rinse and repeat. Quests involve traveling to instanced areas to accomplish goals of killing a quantity of a specific enemy, collecting quest items, closing portals, and interacting with objects. The quests are straightforward and plain enough that there isn’t much to praise, but also not much to trash. I must point out blatant issues with the randomization system, which you can read below. As the game progresses, however, you do come across a few more interesting quests, requiring you to do things like gather materials and craft using blueprints. The story quests are really the only ones that are worth reading, because there is a progressing storyline as you move from act 1 through act 5. It isn’t R.A. Salvatore quality, but it is a decent read.
Your cannon fodder is made up of little more than zombies and other assorted creatures. As you progress, you’ll come across mobs that heal, buff, and protect other mobs of their class, as well as rare and epic versions that are essentially the same mob but with better loot and a lot more health. Also specific to each map is a kill counter that, upon completion, will spawn a mini-boss for you to kill. This resets and continues as long as you are on that map. These higher tier mobs spawn with various attributes, altering what type of damage they deal, their armor, and how they move.
The classes mainly divide the gameplay into one of two categories: Either you are shooting while running backwards, ala Serious Sam, or you are hacking and slashing. I’ve played as a defender (melee) and my main character is an engineer, a ranged class that fires guns and can summon and level up its own set of drones. Combat is pretty straightforward, although you’ll be mashing the mouse keys no matter which class you pick.
You’ll be dismantling most of your weapons and armor anyway, because you’ll need the components in order to upgrade your current equipment, and this is where the game takes a nosedive. Some people enjoy the random nature, others do not, but going into each upgrade requires extensive amounts of resources, and can result in a failed augmentation, losing not only your invested resources, but a level you’d already upgraded. In one night, I lost all of the levels on my rifle, draining its stats to the point where there was no point keeping it. The augmentation is random, and there are also kiosks you can go to to add other benefits to your weapons/armor with pure palladium.
Why You Aren’t Playing Hellgate Global
So why aren’t you playing Hellgate? Possibly because of the cash shop. For how much of the cash shop can be traded, there is more that cannot. Skill retrainers cost $10-$13 and a full respec at endgame will cost you $33. There is some contempt with the community that Hanbitsoft spends too much time adding new things to the cash shop and ignoring problems like memory leaks, crashing, bugs, etc.
Next, the random system in Hellgate is barely functioning at best. Odds are you will come across a bug a few times while playing that will result in either not enough of a specific mob being spawned to meet a kill requirement, or not enough spawned to drop enough items needed for a quest. Teleporting bosses have the occasional habit of moving themselves to an area that can’t be reached, or disappearing altogether and in rare cases never spawning. This is more frustrating considering that a boss may not spawn until you’ve already cleared out a room and come back, so you won’t realize that the boss isn’t spawning until three or four sweeps through the map.
The game also has a habit of not properly explaining features, foremost why certain abilities will simply stop functioning. For instance, if your character finds itself unable to sprint, or suddenly unable to shoot, or your weapon won’t stop firing, there is no feedback to let you know what is currently happening. I’m sure this is all explained somewhere, like in the little icons that sometimes appear in the right hand corner of the screen, but there isn’t enough time in the heat of battle to switch to free mouse and hover over the icons before being surrounded and slaughtered by the minions of hell.
So What’s the Verdict?
Give it a go. Honestly, what do you have to lose? If you are a casual player, you’ll blow through Hellgate without ever spending a nickel, buying the content with the palladium you collect through in-game grinding. Hellgate isn’t a perfect game, as indicated by its Frankenstein-esque murder of its creator, but it is certainly worth a download and at least a look through.
Hellgate’s popularity is difficult to pin down. On one hand, the game always seems relatively populated when I enter. On the other, there are only three threads posted in on the General Discussion forums on the 6th. That being said, there must be a decent amount of people because there is a market for palladium selling, given the chat channels are constantly being pounded by chat spam bots.
