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Hellgate: London

User Rating:

ESRB: Blood and Gore,Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Namco Bandai
Genre(s): Action, Role Playing Game
Home Page: http://www.hellgatelondon.com/

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By: Jarno Kokko Nov 08, 2007

Visuals and Performance

Visually, if you just look at the shiny promotional screenshots, Hellgate: London looks very pretty. And, in places, it does - especially if you have the hardware to run the DirectX 10 version. The cinematic sequences are truly impressive, easily matching the incredible videos present in Blizzard games. Yet it's also inconsistent: animation is the biggest culprit here, with some of the sequences looking very poor and unnatural. The same goes for many areas and models; for each impressive piece of art, you can almost immediately spot another piece near by that is far less impressive. In a way the game does look good, but the overall consistency of the art direction has been sacrificed at some point, probably so the game would ship some day.

Maps are also very repetitive. While using randomly generated maps does, in theory, improve replayability, it can backfire if done wrong. Hellgate: London is a good example of how to fail at this, as the map tiles used to construct the levels are very large and there are too few different tiles; each one is pre-defined right down to the different piles of junk in the corners, so it's easy to notice the repeating patterns, even within a single map. So when you've seen one or two ruined underground tunnel maps, you've seen them all.

Visuals can be uneven at times - that boss looks horrible, and I'm talking about the textures and the model.

User interface is also clumsy and wastes a lot of space.

With DirectX 10 goodies present for those with the latest hardware, Hellgate: London also scales remarkably well towards the low end. In our experience a lowly 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 6600 (not even a GT!) ran the game just fine at 1024x768 with most settings at medium, and the frame rate didn't flinch much even when the CPU was at the minimum (1.8GHz). The requirements do creep up when you bump up the settings, and you have to tinker a bit in any case as the game has an odd urge to set the anti-aliasing to a completely unplayable level considering the hardware. The default settings on the GeForce 6600 called for "High" AA, instantly turning the game into a sub-10fps slideshow. The same is true when starting the game in DX10 mode, with anti-aliasing defaulting to "Very High", which no card on the market can run at a playable speed.

But once you fiddle the settings to a more sane level from the poor defaults, the game runs fine on just about anything you can call a gaming computer. We don't recommend that you try it with a budget, low-end card (such as an ATI Radeon X1300 or NVIDIA GeForce 6200), but it might be barely playable at 640x480 or 800x600. In any case, a DX9 graphics card card with Pixel Shader 2.0 support is what you need, and if that requirement is met, and you have 1GB RAM, it'll run. At lower settings it won't look pretty, but it will run.

Everything at lowest setting.	Things look reasonable even while using the YouGamers minimum configuration (Medium settings).
High setting, playable on most modern hardware.	Very High - the best DX9 hardware can manage.

DirectX 10

Pushing everything to maximum on DX10 hardware (Extreme shaders) - complete with shadow bugs.

Hellgate: London boasts DX10 support out of the box, and this time the DX10 build is actually playable, assuming you have a GeForce 8800GTS or better and 2GB RAM. With no anti-aliasing, but rest of the settings maximized at 1600x1200, the framerate usually floated around 40-60fps, and the only major dips to sub-20fps came in wide open areas or in places where there is a lot of fancy smoke effects. The performance isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than most other DX10 games so far, and for the first time I didn't have the urge to reboot to XP after the first fifteen minutes. Thumbs up for that!

The difference between DX9 and DX10 is not huge, but there are some improvements - DX10 adds motion blur, depth of field, soft shadows and better smoke and fog effects. Sadly the motion blur is seriously overdone, just like in almost every other game that currently uses the effect. What's wrong with using the visual candy in moderation - players can notice your motion blur even if it doesn't hit them squarely at the head the first time they turn the camera!