if you ever need to pick up ONE GAME from 2007, make sure it is HELLGATE LONDON.
In the future, DEMONS are in control of LONDON via HELLGATEs, and it is up to you as a Templar to slay these evil beasties. HELLGATE LONDON revolutionises the use of a game's plot, by bringing down to earth and obscure facts like The London Underground was designed by the Freemasons as a shelter against demon attacks, and weaving around a majestic storyline involving a sadistic oldman, a poor unfortunate techsmith and a game engine which seems to never have reached beta stage, because the guys had THAT MUCH FAITH IN IT (I am aware a Beta of Hellgate London was released, but playing the game doesn't give you the experience of a highly polished finished product, it brings you this really raw and earthy... almost rustic gameplay experience, which personally I think is a bold statement from the team)
The demons are clearly defined by their colours, a Goblin is red, an Imp is Blue. The randomly generated levels mean that the old tired and predictable way of KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE GOING is replaced with aimlessly exploring these vast random areas until you have filled up the map and noticed a small doorway, but then behold the excitement carries on if you were to return to the very same map just a few mere minutes later... it would be ALL RANDOM again!.
The levels capture london perfectly, there are about five different environment types, which are dispersed across all hundred or so levels.

Recently the developers released a patch, with the intent of ruining the rustic experience of the game, a patch they claimed would stop the constant crashes, reduce the slowdown and fix many of the evident (and deliberately placed for sake of experience)flaws (such as randomly being teleported to the start of the map for NO REASON). This patch was majorly hyped by the community as one which would greatly change the experience and bring Hellgate London towards a more professional quality. Happily I must say that they failed, and the patch has achieved absolutely nothing. The game still randomly crashes at the most inoptune moments causing you to trek through three levels again as you have to reload at the train station, the game will still randomly teleport you to the start of a map and the game will still lag on computers which happily play crysis or orange box... lag free.

The combat on Hellgate London is once again truely a marvel and brings out the rustic feel. It consists ONLY of holding down the mouse button and running towards/aiming at enemies, whilst occasionally using a health item (in true retro fashion... special abilities are generally weaker than normal attacks, or take much longer to use (the time of 2-3 normal attacks) but are only slightly more powerful than one attack)
Hellgate London is truely a success for the gamers who yearn for the experience of playing a game which has barely left it's Alpha stage, and provided you are ok risking the stability of your PC by constantly having to reset it due to frequent crashes, it's well worth the play.

Personally here are my roundups

Gameplay - fun and retro
 
Graphics - because of slowdown you have to reduce it down to an unsightly 1???X7???, but it once again feels retro
 
music/sound - the best voice acting known to man
 

OVERALL
9.5/10

hey bro what are the system requiremetns?

will i be abl e to play these are my settings:

intel pentium celeron 800mhs
256 mb ram
30 gb harddreiv
cd rom drive
geforse mx440  pci


sounds cool though i was waiting for this game fo ra while.  i can run crysis on medium settings so i hope i can do this please let me know if it will work

Hellgate London was such a let down. It was the first computer game I bought in 3 years. Didn't really restore my faith in modern games.

The game says you need 1GB of ram, but I am very sure that means you get the joy of it crashing every 20 minutes or so.
but DP... the quality voice acting alone is enough to warrent a purchase of this game, surely!

I was very impressed by the screenshots I saw for this, I hope the gameplay can match.

im not sure if you were joking, goat, but this topic is basically telling you how terrible it is.

it's like they didn't actually play it once they made it.

i dont even get how these same guys made mythos

mythos is 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000% better than this peice of crap

edit: and free

haha, they made mythos? man, mythos is basically a diablo clone and it actually plays WELL

this is a diablo clone (that they charge money for) and it's terrible

how does that work

haha, they made mythos? man, mythos is basically a diablo clone and it actually plays WELL

this is a diablo clone (that they charge money for) and it's terrible

how does that work

i bet they spent all their time working on Mythos, and made Hellgate just to sucker people into giving them money

I was extremely disappointed by this game.  When I bought a new PC about sixth months ago primarily for making music, I picked up a new graphics card later as I thought that I might as well catch up on PC games I had missed over the years.  Hellgate was one of the first games I picked up, and I was really impressed by how terribly incomplete it seemed -- especially after all of the hype that surrounded it.  It doesn't feel very good as a first-person shooter, nor does it feel very good as a third-person hack and slash, so no matter which class you choose it ends up being pretty lame.

However I never had any hardware problems with the game.  It always ran really smoothly and scaled well on my PC before getting a new graphics card, and performed extremely well at the highest settings after upgrading.  I bought it pretty much at day one before the big patch and never had issues with lagging, tearing, or crashing.  Maybe it doesn't run well on ATI brand cards?

I'm Nvidia and it just loves to crash. You seem to be in a minority as Hellgate crashing (for seemingly no reason) is a very very well known problem, and most likely up there with it's non-subscriber penalties as one of it's main criticisms.

I haven't played online, so maybe that has something to do with it?

neither have I :p
(allegedly the online version is more stable though)

Hellgate doesn't really crash on me either. My 3 major complaints are:

1: Getting stuck while jumping around. I love this jump around but I can't because I fear of getting stuck between a bus and a fence. Or something.

2: Not enough different enemies.

3: Not enough different locations / tilesets / randomization in the maps.

Other than that it's a pretty fun game. I like the gameplay and the overall premise but the game just gets too boring because of the repetition.

It seems that a lot of games these days have a get-stuck-in-wall/floor/object glitch.  It happened to me in Bioshock and a shit-load of times in Gears of War (Worst port ever, I might add).  Not surprised that a game as bad as Hellgate London has problems with that as well.

Is beta testing being skimped on? 

Really? I never had any problems with Bioshock. Hellgate London is the only game I've had where the clipping problems are so bad you have to close and reset (and then go through ALL THE LEVELS AGAIN TO GET BACK *_*) to get out of a trap.
Man Sare... There's piccadilly circus in it... just it is like piccadilly for the giants or something... it's so reidiculously oversized (plus I couldn't remember an occultist bookstore when I went there irl last week).

Man Sare... There's piccadilly circus in it... just it is like piccadilly for the giants or something... it's so reidiculously oversized

I've been to piccadilly circus and at first didn't recognize it at all in the game.

I did the beta for HG:L and yes, they released it WAY too early. I was really hoping for Diablo III, and needless to say it did not fill those shoes. You would get stuck on random objects and need to reload. The game crashes randomly. There is virtually no experiential different between spells and guns. Swords swing like 2x4s. Boss battles were entertaining, but still lacked that truly epic and important feel to them (Did this game even have a storyline?). I also recall a time in the beta when my friend and I needed to fight like 15 copies of the boss at once and ended up luring him to the start and going kamikaze over and over. It was just shit.

If you're looking for a Flagship game your best bet is Mythos. It is way better and is more along the lines of what Diablo II was.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and I have to add that the way the multiplayer is set up with the instancing of the stations you get the feel like you are utterly alone. It's difficult to find people to party with, and almost nobody talks unless it's "GIVE FREE STUFF PLZ?"

the bosses were major meat shields, you just end up standing still and hacking/shooting.
There was some kind of storyline, I vaguely followed it until the whole Techsmith314 thing and then I gave up caring.