Hellgate: London? Tabula Rasa? MMOFPS? Get out of town!

The mmorpg community has taken a pretty abrupt turn towards a new form of gameplay, integrating the shooter qualities of an fps into an online role playing game. While I do admit, I wasn't immediately won over by the half-and-half aspect of these games; taking a mediocre fps and mixing it together with the classic aspects of an mmorpg (Talents, spells, armor, etc) wasn't really my thing. It really depends on what you go in expecting. Are you an fps player, or not?

Hellgate: London
What a game this one was. The pre-release hype was similar to that of Crysis, very high expectations and little room for failure. But while Crysis is serving the same fps we've been playing for years on an ornate plate adorned with bells and whistles, Hellgate doesn't have much to compare itself too. (It's not as easy to poke fun at) The fps + mmo genre is a relatively new one, thus I went in playing the Hellgate: London Demo with mixed expectations. It felt like an alpha test, lots of aspects seemed missing and bugs lurked every which way. Assuming the game even felt like loading that time around. It's hard to put into words, the game is like a generic fps with some aspects of an mmo glued onto it.

Tabula Rasa:
I set the bar pretty low for this one, the Hellgate had failed me, and I didn't expect Richard Garriot's Tabula Rasa do much better. I was wrong. Ncsoft definitely knows what they are doing. I couldn't find much wrong with the "Clean Slate" of a game that Tabula Rasa is (I needed a clean slate after Hellgate wrecked the previous one) It's a good mix of fps and rpg elements that gives the new genre a fighting chance. One of the few games that is well worth the monthly subscription fee.


A picture says a million words.















-Floodge