Hellgate: London. While it may sound like a headline from the Evening Standard (with some delightful scaremongering about immigration and/or youth gangs attached), it's actually an old school action RPG of the Diablo mold (made by the same team in fact) masquerading as a cutting edge game. Which isn't to dismiss what it's done out of hand - there's a very powerful reason that Diablo has sold as many millions of copies as it has, and while Hellgate has a good stab at matching the experience, there are just a few too many niggles for me to be able to give it a score befitting its heritage.

The story goes something like this: the year is 2038 and London is a charred wreck of its former glory. Beings from another dimension have swept into England's capital and, presumably upset at the price that a zone 2 studio flat will cost them, have thrown a bit of a hissy fit and tried to wipe out humanity. There are a handful of people left living in the remains of the underground system, delighted at the property price crash but somewhat miffed at the methods used to achieve it. While this clichéd scenario of our capital being overtaken by maddened feral monsters intent on causing unimaginable damage might seem a bit far fetched for some, as a regular commuter on the East London underground line it didn't require a great suspension of disbelief for me, so I was more than happy to carry on.

You pick from one of six available classes and then travel from one area to the next, carrying out quests and side quests. By killing hundreds of beasties you gain enough experience points to level up, giving you better skills and powers depending on your class. The classes themselves are interesting and varied - you have the marksman who is rather apt with a firearm, the guardian who deals in close combat melee, the blademaster who delivers more melee damage with dual wielding, the summoner who can summon monsters, the evoker who is like an old-school mage and the engineer who can build bots, drones and weapons. Picking just one of these is a difficult decision and it makes the multiplayer that much more rewarding when you can join a team where your skills will complement those of your allies, rather than having to endure your character's shortcomings alone. Thankfully, each class is pretty easy to get along with and their strengths are quick to learn and master, ensuring that you're unlikely to regret your choice three or four hours into the action.

And this action, as mentioned previously, involves grinding, clicking, killing, gathering and levelling up, which may confuse you if you've taken a glance at the gorgeous screenshots adorning this page before reading this prose. You see, Hellgate is played from a first of third person perspective (depending on class), but make no mistake - this is more Diablo than Doom. True, the clicking a monster to kill it has been replaced by (in the case of the marksman) aiming at a monster, clicking and then killing it, but once the superficial graphical niceties are out of the way, you realise that the gameplay is far more reliant on experience points than quick mouse reflexes. Although the change makes it lovely to look at, it actually seems counterintuitive in that it breaks up the ability to be lost in the game world's atmosphere. While it was quite easy to feel well 'ard when beating a three-eyed ogre to death in Diablo, you just feel a bit silly when your three headshot-aimed rockets bounce off a monster's bonce and into the London sewers, with no gratifying visual damage. The visuals are great though and, while it can never compete with upcoming shooters, it's far more of a looker than most recent RPGs (Oblivion excluded of course!) The backdrops are gorgeous, the monsters suitably ugly (Hellgate follows the standard RPG model of noisy beggars with lots of teeth) and the weapon and magic effects nice and flashy. It does lose points on the sound however - surely we've come far enough that character text boxes (ugly, ugly interface for these too) should have died out quicker than the human population that the game chronicles the experiences of? The sound isn't particularly memorable, with each character having a couple of sound-bytes that only succeed in helping you to tell them apart through stereotype alone. Nonetheless, barring a couple of caveats, the change from the usual overhead perspective is a success - at least from an aesthetic standpoint.

However, in many ways it's quite surprising how little difference the shift of perspective has on proceedings, but immediately after looting the first monster's cold dead body you do get flashbacks to 1994 - including the irritating process of having to rearrange your inventory every five minutes to fit the new exciting pair of booties you've just acquired. With that said, in other areas they've made great strides in the old RPG mechanics - you can break useless inventory items to access their components, which can be used to make better weapons for example, and you can upgrade your existing weapons with batteries, ammo packs and fuel pods. There are also machines at the tube stations (the bases where you save, and buy and sell stuff) that allow you to remove upgrades from weapons, which mean the old days of wasting a super power-up in your bow and arrow only to find a better one around the corner don't frustrate anymore.

Unfortunately, elsewhere Hellgate is firmly stuck in the Twentieth Century. There's the RPG staple of randomly generated maps for example - in principle a clever way of creating a unique multiplayer experience every time, but in reality an exercise in poorly laid out repetition. By using the same textures over and over again, all you end up with are several identical looking stereotypical London streets with the same degree of linearity as a 30cm ruler. This is partly down to the change of perspective - if the developers had made a first person game that was as open as a traditional top down RPG then it would be incredibly easy to get lost and frustrated. As a result, the randomly generated maps are very cramped, leading you down a set route. If you go the wrong way you very quickly reach a dead end and discover that the other direction is the way you wanted to go all along. Put simply, the game could have made some excellent level designs that FPS aficionados are used to - but a computer cannot (at this stage) randomise in such a way to play particularly well. I can understand that randomised maps are kind of necessary for multiplayer (it would be dull if there were no surprises when playing with friends) but a bit of good single player level design would have made the world of difference in single player - especially as the generic textures repeat themselves to the degree of irritation just a few hours in.

Another big issue is the bugs. This isn't the worse offending game I've ever played in terms of bugs (I should have earned a medal for battling my way through both SiN and Vampire: Bloodlines, frankly), but it has some pretty bad issues. The worst offending of these is a random slowdown issue, where firing a weapon in a busy area once led to two minutes of unplayable one frame every few seconds gameplay, eventually requiring a restart. True this might be partly due to my Frankenstein's monster of a PC, but a cursory glance at online forums suggests that I'm not the only one affected by this pretty crucial problem - something made significantly worse by the fact that the game saves your character but not your progress until you reach a tube station. Some would argue that time slowing to a crawl while you wait for your underground stop adds to the realism, but personally I would prefer to have life's inconveniences removed from videogames rather than emulated - if I wanted that then I'd play The Sims. The loading times are also pretty shocking, though in this respect I can lay the blame firmly at the dust encrusted feet of my PC, so I shall give Hellgate the benefit of the doubt.

One area where the game has managed to make greater strides towards modernity is within its multiplayer experience. Many an RPG has been made immeasurably better when played alongside friends, and unsurprisingly Hellgate follows suit. Hellgate delivers something of a novel concept in the multiplayer arena, offering a free online multiplayer service where players essentially play the single player mode with friends, or a subscription-based model where ongoing content is created. Both options play out a bit like an MMORPG-lite, whereby you meet other players in the tube station spawn points and decide who should join your group based on a rudimentary chat system. Once you have a team of tough guys, you can go on your merry way, slashing and hacking beasties in the visceral manner of the single player.

Both the free and subscription modes play as well as to be expected, making an already quite compulsive experience all the more engaging with likeminded people encouraging you to enjoy one more dungeon. However, it's easy to be sceptical about the optional subscription model when currently it doesn't offer that offer much additional benefit. It's early days and it will be interesting to see if it takes off, but at this stage there seems to be very little to gain from paying the subscription fee, aside from the ability to join guilds and the promise of 'ongoing content' down the line - whatever that means. It's tough to review on potential alone though - and that's just something we can only answer in a few months time. One worry about this is that the additional MMO-style content will be more of the lazy side quests, which already feel a little too World of Warcraft for my liking - no matter how much justification a game gives, going into a zone and killing ten monsters will always just be killing ten monsters. Another important thing to note about the multiplayer is that you need to start a separate online profile - your single player character cannot go online, for security reasons presumably. Not a bad thing necessarily, just worth noting before you start if you intend to get seriously into the online aspect of the game.

Despite the above complaint about side quests, the game is often wonderfully compulsive. If the formula of hack + slash = level up wasn't moreish then the genre would have died out years ago and it still works well today. It is compulsive and chock-full of that 'one more dungeon, then bed' factor that never seems to be as effective a sleep management tool as you hope it will be. And the setting - clichéd as it may be - is pretty damn cool; I definitely appreciate the London theme, being from the capital myself. And while the number of pillar boxes and other stereotypes of London make it overtly clear that the game was not made by Brits, the faithful recreation of some of the country's famous landmarks is a lovely touch. It's quite rare that the UK gets recognition in games, aside from the top down GTA London and the embarrassingly 'Alwight me old mucker' sections of Vampire: The Masquerade. It's also a very funny game in places - one nice touch is that every item has a 'famous' quote attached to it in your inventory. The one for the default shirt is a line made famous through a Right Said Fred song, for example. These little things provide a pleasant break from the dangerously repetitious gameplay and certainly make it easy to overlook its faults and look back on the game fondly.

But for all its Twenty-First Century presentation and looks, there's very much a late Twentieth Century game at its core. While this isn't a bad thing per se, and it has an addictive quality, we really should be looking for more advancements than this to the tried and tested formula. It's a hoot with friends and even on your own it has a delightfully playable quality to it, but it's just Diablo playing in the FPS dress up box. It's a sad conclusion to draw, but Hellgate: London will never be remembered as the role-playing classic it could have been with a little more work and a little less time paying homage to its RPG grandfather.

Reviewed by Alan Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).