I played a bit more Hellgate: London tonight, making it to Charing Cross Station. It’s been pretty much more-of-the-same so far, advancing through tunnels from zone to zone, killing ‘x’ number of a certain critter or activating ‘y’ of a certain item along the way in order to complete quests. There were some pretty frantic battles along the way though, especially when the tunnels opened up a bit and there were a flood of imps with ranged attacks, forcing you to seek cover. Loot has been plentiful, though I’m sticking mostly with my automatic rifle as my main weapon. The blasters require too much manual tapping of both mouse buttons, and the rocket launcher fires and reloads too slowly.

The biggest problem so far remains its relative bugginess, though. There was a small patch today to correct a minor problem, but after the patch was applied, restarting the game caused it to crash instantly every time I tried. A reboot eventually cleared it up, but upon selecting my character and entering a station, it froze a minute later. The /played time reported appears to bear no relation to time actually spent on the character, preventing me from even trying for the level-x-in-y-hours achievements. The framerate dips horribly at certain points in some stations, even though there’s nothing visually strenuous around.

There’s still a pretty decent game at its core, but damn, they really should have applied another six months or so of debugging and polishing…