You can’t preserve a superb game down, or a messy one both it appears. Over a decade after its stumbling 2007 launch sank developer Flagship Studios, motion RPG Hellgate: London is because of return on November 15th, beneath the stewardship of Korean developer T3 Entertatinment and writer HanbitSoft. The writer declare it to be the very newest iteration of the game, full with the Hellgate: Tokyo enlargement that by no means made it to the unique retail model, however had beforehand surfaced in an earlier (and since discontinued) free-to-play relaunch.
I admittedly fairly loved Hellgate: London when it first got here out. No denying that it was buggy and that the enterprise mannequin was a multitude (an ungainly mix of retail, cash-shop and subscription), however I loved wading by demons with an outsized swarm rocket launcher. Hoarding loot because it popped out of monsters that ragdolled by the air was gratifying for some time. It scratched the identical itch that Diablo 2 did for just a few weeks, although my coronary heart now belongs to the ever-evolving Path Of Exile.
Credit to GameBanshee for internet hosting this trailer from the darkish, blurry age of YouTube.
Still, this shock return is simply baffling. HanbitSoft have already tried to revive the game earlier than to restricted success, and a Greenlight entry for the game in 2014 went largely unnoticed. Even extra surreal, whereas researching the historical past of the game for this story, I found {that a} (now additionally defunct) first-person cell spinoff launched again in 2016, accompanied by this bizarre trailer, describing it because the “Evolution of FPS: Not heavy but fancy!”. The new model’s retailer web page is accompanied by some equally odd English, promising “single play optimized scenario contents”.
All that mentioned, I’m nonetheless interested by this newly introduced model. While the Steam retailer web page for it doesn’t verify that it’ll be free-to-play, it looks as if an inexpensive assumption. I by no means bought the possibility to poke round Tokyo earlier than. While one post-apocalyptic cityscape is essentially nearly as good as one other (I discovered the extradimensional maps most enjoyable to bomb round), having some recent environments and a few new monsters to stab ought to liven it up. I can’t see myself sinking various hours into a brand new Hellgate launch, however I’ll give it a spin, for outdated time’s sake.
Hellgate: London relaunches on November 15th. You can discover it here on Steam. No worth or enterprise mannequin has been introduced but.