The NDA on the Hellgate: London Beta was lifted today and I have a lot to say. Judged solely on its own merits, Hellgate: London is a good game. Sure, it could use an extra six months of spit shine before being shoved out the door – though worse games in earlier stages of development have been boxed, shipped, and sold – but this game has quite a pedigree. Half its development team worked on the Diablo franchise and its monthly fee puts it in direct competition with World of Warcraft, the most pervasive game in the history of the medium. Simply put: Hellgate: London does not meet the massive expectations laid upon it; this is not Diablo 3.

It tries very hard to be Diablo 3, though. Hellgate: London is an action RPG with randomly generated levels, skill trees, and plenty of sexy loot porn. Weapon mods replace gems and runes, lockers replace player stashes, and the nano forge replaces the Horadric cube. It improves on the basic Diablo formula as well, adding a third weapon switch slot, replacing gambling with the augmentrex 3000 – a tool that lets you add additional modifiers to items, for a price – and adding a Halo-esque shield mechanic on top of a traditional health bar. There’s also a Wirt’s leg reference, and yes, you do get a wieldable prosthetic limb. But for all these Diablo staples, the game largely seems to have missed the point. Does even Bill Roper not understand what makes Diablo fun?

Sure, the levels are random, but they’re all painfully linear. Building straight lines out of random arrangements of the same dozen set pieces doesn’t make for an interesting or replayable gameworld. Levels rarely branch or diverge – they have no width. The levels themselves connect in boring ways too, shooting off of hub areas like legs on a starfish. The hub connects to area A, connects to area B, connects to area C, then its back to the hub which connects to area D. This same structure is repeated with no variety. And while Diablo 2 had a whole world as its playground, Hellgate: London, rather obviously, only gives us London. There’s only so many way to randomize grey streets, sewers, and subway tunnels.

On top of that, the game just isn’t very fun to play. Combat is very, very easy. Your inventory is huge, allowing you to carry a wealth of potions with you at all times, and the enemies aren’t particularly difficult, interesting, or numerous. You proceed through the game following a single, epic questline, but many offshoot quests turn up along the way. The problem is none of these sidequests require you to diverge from the path in any way. A templar gives you a quest to activate some beacons and a woman wants her dead husband’s wedding ring, but both objectives are en route to your next stop on the main questline express. The whole experience is incredibly linear, and never really feels random at all. Playing the game, you feel as though you’re eating the same path as everyone else – killing the same easy monsters and completing the same boring quests. Attempts to provide more interesting fare – like an RTS-inspired mission where you control a squad of four soldiers against an army of demons – fall flat, proving just as uninteresting and shallow as the rest of the experience.

One of the primary sources of Diablo 2’s longevity stemmed from the skill system. Each class had 30 skills divided between three skill trees. Every skill required players to be a certain level and have at least a single point invested in all prerequisite skills. Additionally, skills complemented one another through a synergy system, allowing you to spend points in otherwise useless skills in order to boost the power of other abilities. The end result was a system that allowed for an extreme amount of customization. You could fill a game with eight characters of the same class and no two of them would have similar builds or playstyles. Hellgate: London’s attempt to mirror this skill system is borderline pathetic.

Each of the six classes has only a single skill tree with (about) 26 skills. The trees themselves almost never branch or bend and are instead arranged in simple, parallel lines. There are no synergies in place, and in order to combat any point saving, the game places strange restrictions on the skills, requiring specific levels for each invested skill point and requiring you spent a certain number of points in a prerequisite skill before you can buy the next ability in the tree. On top of that, many of the skills overlap in terms of function, causing minimal difference between specializations. There’s also a strange imbalance within trees themselves, as ignoring certain skills completely gimps your class while other abilities are entirely useless, existing only to fill a slot in the tree. The system certainly matches Diablo’s in appearance, but functionally it doesn’t allow for any interesting customization.

As you can see, this sort of narrow linearity is a major theme in Hellgate: London. Playing the game is a very guided experience. At no point do you feel in control of the game; the developers’ hands never leave yours. Diablo 2 was so great, and is still so wildly popular, because of the tremendous amount of freedom present in the game. From skill and item selection to the wide, open levels, Diablo 2 was a game that begged you find your own path through it. Hellgate: London has already forged the path and you need only eat it, like a rat (or Pac-Man) in a very linear maze.

For a game that’s already gone gold and is supposed to be on store shelves in less than two weeks, Hellgate: London sure has plenty of nasty bugs. Any enemy that flies, jumps, or hovers is a lost cause, its behavior a buggy menagerie of pathing errors and invincible evasion sessions. Also, skills sometimes get stuck in “on” positions, continually firing until all your mana is depleted. Oh, and the game crashes to desktop. Constantly. In fact, I’m now writing this instead of playing the beta because I experienced such a hardcore crash earlier, that my game no longer works at all, and I lack the will to reinstall it.

As it stands now, Hellgate: London is an unfinished game. I have no doubt that a year and many patches from now, Hellgate: London will be a great game. The basic framework is in place, but too many of the specifics are heavily flawed. The fact that Flagship expects people to pay a monthly fee for this is nothing short of laughable. Hellgate: London is a linear single player game masquerading as an AAA multiplayer title and the heir to Diablo’s legacy. Sure, it’s a good enough game in its own right, but why settle for good when we’ve already experienced greatness?