As noted last month, HELLGATE: London has launched today on Steam and is 25% off (regular price $12.99) until November 23rd.  The Tokyo content was pulled and will be reinstated once HanbitSoft deals with whatever issues that needs to be resolved (it will not cost extra when that happens).  The multiplayer portion (from later updates) is also unavailable but HanbitSoft has not mentioned if this will be implemented in the future (given the absence of information, I’m presuming it might end up being a DLC addon).

The base game itself is pretty much unchanged once HanbitSoft took over the game from Flagship Studio.  They primarily added the ability to run the game as higher screen resolutions.  I was able to play at 2560×1440 (though some assets like the logo image were merely scaled up) with some odd quirks.  Like it took awhile for some tutorial screens to popup (which prevented me from performing certain keyboard actions like moving or picking up items).

Also after exiting the game, my desktop turned into a jumbled mess so it’s doing something weird with the screen resolution.  Basically, I would say to anyone who never played this 10 years ago, should keep their expectations really low because it is what it is;  a mid-2000 style game and not anything like say Destiny or Warframe.  It lacks todays high resolution artwork and modeling.  It lacks a lot of quality of life improvements that are common place in titles today.  This is essentially what the Blizzard North folks were working on after leaving the company with trying to create an ARPG in a first person shooter style game.  You can easily see the similar artstyle in the graphics for example (but at a higher quality level compared to Diablo II).

Beyond that, this is sort of a trip down memory lane where even though this updated version is sort of mashed up hybrid of the single player and bits of the multiplayer content (but with the actual multiplayer removed), it sort of takes you back in time to thinking what might have been had Blizzard North stayed intact and they had worked on other titles including this and Mythos (which was Flagships ARPG MMO that could be played with an isometric camera, 3rd person, and first person view).

EDIT:  And I’ve been in this for a few hours now since it really does take me back to those first days in the original Diablo where you go wandering around exploring, killing monsters, trying to loot everything they drop (since you need money or also in this case, dismantling them for materials to use in either crafting or augmenting items).  The combat, movement, and animations are still meh (sort of like higher resolution 3D versions of the pixel sprites that were in the first two Diablo’s) but that ARPG feeling that has been missing for me for awhile, is there.