The 'Smoke' falls under the cloven hoof of Lucifer's legions in this action RPG from EA. So pull on your 'daisy roots' dash down the 'frog and toad' and give old horny a bunch o'fives in his 'boat race'.
Publisher: EA
Developer: Flagship Studios
Released: 2nd November 2007
Platform: PC
When the apocalypse finally comes, when the seas boil and the sky is as blood, when the denizens of the netherworld finally rise up to claim the Earth as their own, what will you do? If the creators of Hellgate: London are to be believed, we'll dress up like Power Rangers and dick about in the London Underground.
There are some great videogame visions of the apocalypse. The Fallout series lead the way with bottle top currency and underground bunkers. STALKER delivered a nightmare vision of an abandoned city crawling with mutants. Hellgate: London doesn't even come close.
This is not to say HGL is a poor game, it's not. The graphics are sumptuous, the action is frantic and the oft-used experience point levelling system is addictive in the extreme. The problem is, the game doesn't live up to its core idea - London under the boot of an invasion.
Hellgate's London features some nice details - the 'jam sandwich' police cars, the pillar boxes, the corner boozers - but while the constituent parts are there, they don't add up to our fair capital. Apart from a few pre-designed areas (such as Piccadilly Circus and the (drained) Thames alongside the Houses of Parliament) 'London' is a randomly generated mish-mash of swap-in/swap-out buildings lifted from Mary Poppins 2: The War Years.
The human refuges in the tube stations are nicely detailed fictional recreations, but the 'visual' is the only appeal. No quivering survivors, no hastily erected shanty towns, no whiff of a population on the verge of extinction. Instead you'll find hale, hearty and instantly forgettable NPC quest-givers and shopkeepers - most with astonishingly bad accents. Your hero is similarly uninspiring.
One snore unto the breach, dear fiends
You take the role of a demon-destroying hero, cast from a number of cliché-ridden moulds. The combat types come from the Buzz Lightyear school of armoury compete with codpieces and Toys R Us weaponry. The more magical classes can be found in the toilets of any Goth nightclub you care to mention complete with bare-midriffs, Matrix leather and 'ooh aren't we alternative' tattoos.
As your one-dimensional saviour, you'll head out (solo or online with some other equally generic buddies) into the tunnels or onto the surface. Being up to your elbows in the denizens of hell is initially a blast, but wears thin after wave after wave of mindlessly wandering monsters either rush you like Beatles groupies or flee to shoot at a distance. The creature designs are suitably warped but while the devil may have all the best tunes, he lucked out on the AI programmers.
Hell comes to smog town
With such a rich idea behind it Hellgate: London could have been astounding. It could have portrayed a nightmare vision of one of Europe's greatest cities under demonic siege. It could have shown a desperate Britain on-the-ropes calling out for international aid from any quarter. It could have depicted a plucky British populace thrust back into blitz-mentality 60 years on, forced to create weapons and armour from the wreckage of their city and take shelter behind makeshift fortifications and the shield of faith.
Instead we have a fun but repetitive action-RPG that fails to conjure London, fails to scare and fails to deliver a story worthy of even Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. It appears that here, the first casualty of war is creativity.