Announced at E3 back in May, Hellgate: London hasn’t made as big of a splash on the PC Gaming hype wagon that I would have expected. The game has got quite a few things going for it, including one of PC gaming’s strongest legacies.

Set in the depths of London five years after a demon apocalypse, Hellgate is an action RPG and not a FPS (despite what the screenshots look like). The gameplay is more ‘point and shoot’ than of ‘aim and shoot’ — due to RPG gameplay elements your effective weapon accuracy increases as your character levels up. Don’t let this layer of disconnection scare you - the game is under development by the same crack-team that designed and wrote a little phenomenon called Diablo.

The game has the paper-doll inventory like most other RPGS - drag items and weapons into slots to alter your appearance, and increase armor, damage, or other abilities. Weapon upgrades are significant part of the gameplay as well, so much so that there’s an inventory screen dedicated to your weapon. Dragging items to your weapon significantly alter the weapon’s appearance and performance. It even has it’s own paper doll — Their goal is to let you design your own weapons to your liking using the components that you’ve picked up through your adventures.

And like Diablo, this game has a built in Random Map Generator. No two game sessions will ever be the same. Awesome.

Check out Gamespot’s Hellgate: London gamespace for links to movies and previews. Also click on any of these screenshots to enlarge ‘em.

The publisher hasn’t set a release date yet, but I would assume that it’ll come out sometime next year. Probably Summer. I’ll keep you posted.