Apologies for the double post, but I had one I wanted to post while it was fresh:
Hellgate: London (PC):
This is the first game from Flagship Studios, the people who left Blizzard North (the Diablo team). It therefore has a bit of hype around it as being what they would have done with the Diablo franchise, though there's more of a sci-fi element to this game to avoid too many direct comparisons.
The demo gives you access to two of the many classes available in the full game, the Marksman and Blademaster. The Marksman plays from first-person view (though it can be zoomed out to third-person), and makes for some odd gameplay. Essentially it looks like an FPS but plays like something like Diablo. Shoot a zombie in a room full of them and, rather than them all charging (like an FPS), only a few will peel off and casually shuffle towards you (like an MMO). There's almost no AI to speak of and it makes the Marksman quite dull, because even just a bit of FPS experience means you'll plow through every enemy outside of the special 'named' ones without any trouble.
Blademaster, the melee class, was a lot more fun. They start with a sword and shield, but there's also a dual-wield skill to unlock in the skill tree. Even without that you can equip the sword in one hand and a grappler (which you start with in your inventory) in the other, allowing you to fire it an enemy, pulling them towards you for some stabbing. Combined with skills that regenerate health by attacking which encourage you to keep up some attacking momentum, it's much more reminiscent of Diablo 2 and feels like an evolution of its Barbarian class.
That said though, the demo is severely lacking. I was only able to find four quests in the quest hub in addition to a story quest that you can't finish, and they were all very much in the style of an MMO: Kill ten zombies in area X, then three in area Y, collect Wart's Leg in area X by killing a named creature and collect ten capacitors from enemies in area Y. After that you get no more quests that I could find, despite the game having two more areas to explore. So essentially the demo has reached its end but makes no attempt to tell you so, causing much running back and forth on my part in an attempt to find what I had to do next.
The quest givers do not voice their quests like they do in the Diablo games, instead opting again for the MMO model, playing a random voice sample when a conversation is initiated and another when the conversation ends. These voice samples are horrendous, not necessarily because of the bad attempt at British accents (though they aren't great) but because of what they actually say. They just spout nonsense, and it's very irritating.
So essentially the single-player experience (there's no multiplayer in the demo) opts for all the generic-ness of an MMO-lite rather than going for the already fairly light RPG/story elements of the Diablo games, and based on the demo the potential multiplayer will be just as bland. As such I can't help but be disappointed, especially as any new content is going to come via a paid subscription. Bring on Diablo 3...
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