Game Title: Hellgate: London	MMOsite Resources:
	Genre: Fantasy		Official Site
	Developer: Flagship Studios		Screenshots
	Publisher: IAHGames		Video
	Status: Open Beta

This review is written by Brian Beck from ugo.com

I would be lying through my teeth if I said that Diablo didn't revolutionize the world of action RPGs with its release. Instead of having to worry about turn based battles and the like, you just ran through dungeons and hacked up tons of monsters. The goal? To get loot. Glorious, glorious loot and normal items were fun, but those uniques were often what made the day. Sure, your character may not have looked too different when you equipped armor and weapons, but the spells and abilities you could use often make for different gameplay.

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The best one-line description I can give you for Hellgate London is Diablo 2 in 3D with rocket launchers. See, here we are in the year 2038, as opposed to whenever the heck Diablo took place. London is under siege by massive armies of demons and you, intrepid adventurer, are tasked with eliminating them all from existence.

The first staple of the isometric action RPG that you'll see in Hellgate is the class system. You have six different classes that you can pick from at the moment, divided into three schools. The first are your melee fighters. Guardians are more defensively based while Blademasters are offensive based. Next up come the casters, with Evokers being the "blow stuff up, ask questions later" type of caster and Summoners calling up tons upon tons of elementals to do their bidding. Finally, my personal favorites are the gun-toting Marksman and Engineer. Marksman focus heavily on the gun side of things, getting abilities that let them snipe enemies and the like while Engineers get mechanical pets and some more party-friendly abilities. The classes are about as balanced as can be expected at this point in the game.

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After you've done the whole character customization process (which isn't all too deep), you get to start the fun stuff, killing hordes upon hordes of demons. Well, demons, zombies, beasts and such, sure, but you're killing lots of stuff. Of course, just why are you going around killing all these things? It definitely isn't for the story. You see, this is where one of Hellgate's main flaws comes into play. The story is absolutely, positively not memorable in the least. Instead of taking a Diablo style approach to displaying quest text (having it sort-of float along the middle of the screen) or a WoW style of presenting it in a journal, Hellgate forces you to press the forward button to go through the text. It can't be that bad, right? Wrong. You're pressing the button for every line of text, sometimes pressing it 10 or 15 times to get through the text.

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