Hellgate London demo

The demo for Hellgate London is now available from pretty much anywhere. You can either play a blademaster (melee combat) or a marksman (ranged combat) until about level 4, at which point you'll find yourself at some dead end in a dungeon without being told that the demo is over. But at least you get to play a couple of quests, kill lots of zombies and even a few boss mobs, and get to know the game.

Me, I didn't like it. It's mouse look, even in 3rd person over-the-shoulder view I get video game sickness from it. And I don't think the game justifies the hype. It's a Diablo clone with a Sci-Fi theme. A good one, but far, far from being a MMORPG. As blademaster it plays similar to a fantasy action RPG, click, click, click, monster dead. As soon as you notice that you can put the skill which replenishes health on your left mouse button and it also slashes with your weapon when you do so and click the mouse, the game gets far too easy. Only the bosses remain a challenge. The marksman plays more like a shooter, and funnily has less problems with the bosses, but more problems with larger numbers of trash mobs. Throwing grenades is lots of fun, because you never know where they'll land.

You collect lots of loot, which you can either sell to buy better stuff, or you can disassemble it into parts, which you can use at a nanoforge to upgrade existing items to a higher level. Rarely you can also find mods, but the only one I found was a relic, which is used to improve blademaster items, only that I was playing the marksman at that time. Makes me wonder if in the final game you can pass items from one character to another, but I'd guess that would then only be avaible for subscribers.

If you like action RPGs, you should download the demo and have a look. Me, I've seen enough and will not buy it.