Game Comparison: Hellgate London vs. Titan Quest

This is a new type of review in which i'm going to compare two games between them by analyzing key elements and seeing which is better. I wanted to do it a while ago, but since i didn't have that much experience in these 2 games, i decided to play through them a little more to see if anything changes later in the game. Note that at the time of writing this, i have yet to finish any of these games, so my experience is mostly mid-game. I could go and finish them, but frankly i don't think i ever will (at least not Hellgate). Now let's proceed with the comparison. Note that from now on, Hellgate will be abbreviated as HG and Titan Quest as TQ. When talking about Titan Quest, i'll have the expansion (Immortal Throne) in mind.
Why HG vs TQ? Because they're basically clones of the same game (Diablo 2) while being pretty much different in how they work. So who's the better clone? I'll try to detail an oppinion as unbiased as possible.
Outside
The outside of the game are the elements which directly influence you as a player, such as graphics, sound and feeling.
Graphics
HG: the game takes advantage of Directx10, that and the fact that it's about 2-3 years newer than Titan Quest makes Hellgate the better one to choose for graphics. I played it with all settings to max except AA, and i can say that the graphics are somewhere along the lines of "pretty nice". Even with Directx10, i don't feel that the game makes the most out of the graphics engine... faces are pretty sharp when you look at them at a close distance, and the game has this omnipresent blur that not only makes you dizzy, it's also unnecessary.
The design of the armor suits is awesome though, and is one factor i really like more than TQ. The mobs could use some work.
TQ: not much to say here, the game has nice graphics for its age, the lawn bending as you run through it is a really nice touch, and the producers have made sure that we'd see it. TQ follows Diablo in its viewing perspective, but it's 3D and gives a pretty "clean" view, isometric as it is.
The armor and weapon design tries to replicate those of ancient times, but i found it pretty weird that my male character has to wear a skirt for the whole damn game, even an armored skirt like the Romans wore. Monster-wise, it's about as interesting as Hellgate, nothing really out of the ordinary.
One thing about TQ though: it suffers from rubber-banding, the phenomenon where the game starts to slow down, then fast forward again for a second. This apparently happens when your system is BETTER than the reccomended requirements. No fix yet, and i doubt there ever will be one.
Sound
Neither games had an impressive soundtrack, in fact i found it so boring that i resorted to external music (for the record, HG with Nightwish playing is significantly better). I lasted more when it came to TQ, though it's nothing special. I guess they copied Diablo pretty well on that part. As for the normal sounds... well, hack&slash games never had GREAT dialogue, but TQ does have better lines for its NPCs, and they do actually say what it's written in that little box over their heads. HG has some lines which attempt to be funny, but take away a lot of the feeling through that, at least i didn't like'em.
Ambience
Ambience is the feeling you get when you look around in a game world, and how much what you see/hear/etc affects you. Games with a strong ambience tend to base themselves heavily on exploiting human emotions to make you like them (i.e. horror games), others (like arcade shooters) tend to not concentrate so much on the surroundings.
HG: the ambience in this game is apocalyptic, in fact it reminds me of Fallout when i think of it (but not in a good or bad way, mind you, it just reminds me of Fallout): destroyed buildings, dark skies, demonic ships patroling those dark skies, remnants of a war fought long-ago with conventional weapons, abandoned barricades, demon-infested sewers and metro tunnels, no sign of humans, at least until you reach the safe zones. All this, mixed in with British architecture and style, and Sci-Fi elements. The blend is far from perfect, and there's something in it that doesn't really attract me. But it's good enough for a hack&slash game.
TQ: Ancient Greece, China and Egypt are some of the locations which describe this game. While in HG you have abandoned and defeated war outposts, in TQ the war is fresh and there's hardly any damage to the enviroment. The game's sights, while pretty, mostly don't have any connections that make you stop and say "wow, so this is what ancient Greece was like" because they're mostly simple: greece is mountains and green grass, egypt is desert, china is snow... though you do visit some interesting places like the Acropolis and the Pyramids. All in all, ambience is better in HG than in TQ.
Feeling
Ambience's bigger brother, feeling refers to the emotion you get when you're right in the middle of things, blasting away at enemies and doing whatever the game wants you to do. Feeling is the strongest emotion you can get out of a game, takes a lot from the soundtrack, and is closely related to FUN.
HG: The feeling in hellgate isn't intense. Actually, there's hardly any feeling at all in that game... unless you're listening to Nightwish. I swear, that music is the only thing that kept me playing it.
Without it, it would have been headache heaven. So i can't really have a pure oppinion on this, but i can surely say that the feeling in HG isn't quite much... even after trying several characters.
TQ: the feeling that you're overpowered prevails, and if you choose the right class, this game can be pretty much thrilling even as a normally dull class like a healer. TQ is a game made to make you tell your friends "dude, i kick ass so much with that char" and that gets major points from me. The gameplay styles are enormously diverse, and you soon grow attached to the character. One element that adds to continued feeling is the better customization options, i'll get into that later.
Inside
A game's inside elements are the ones happening to the game rather than to you personally, both behind and in front of the curtain. These are mostly game mechanics.
Complexity
Complexity isn't what should be discussed in a hack&slash, but this is a comparison, and all games are complex, when looked at in relative terms. Some are just less complex than others. And some gamers, like me, appreciate the level of complexity even in a simple game.
Basically, complexity means diversity and amount of content.
HG: this game is complex, in that i don't really know what some things mean even by now. I don't know how the damage mechanics are calculated, nor do i know how many types of damage there are in the game. The skills are of very specific use, and even if they don't have many practical applications, even if some skills are totally useless, i can't say Hellgate isn't diverse. The item enhancements are mostly Diablo-ish (normal, magical, rare, unique) just with different names for them. To do stuff with items, you need to first dismantle unneeded items(destroying the item in the process, therefore eliminating selling items for money), which nets you some materials with which you can upgrade your weapon damage (or armor value), or create new items. Since you don't sell the items, money is pretty scarce (which isn't what you'd expect from a hack&slash but from an MMO, but in my book it's definitely a good thing), and you're left with even less if you choose to add some stats to your item.
Another diverse factor in HG is the playstyle: HG offers 3 completely different (as opposed from the usually slightly different) playstyles, based on the class you choose. You can play it mostly like an FPS (engineer and marksman), a 3rd person shooter (evoker and summoner), or a 3rd person action (guardian and blademaster). Overall, HG is complex, too bad the complexity doesn't add much fun to it.
TQ: attempts to bring originality to character building in that it lets you choose one speciality tree in the beginning, and ANOTHER later on. There are about 10 of them, so the class combinations in this game are huge. Even more so, each combination gets its own unique name, and as far as i've seen, most of them work quite well with any other, provided you know where to put your points. In the skills chapter, TQ owns HG hard since it has a lot more skills, and even though the uses are not so diverse, you don't get bored that fast and there's always the decision-between-what-to-choose that has to be made. Regarding items, they're the same complexity as diablo and HG, TQ only having broken items as a plus compared to Hellgate. I've yet to see a set item in HG, but there have to be some. Items in TQ can be customised with special charms that you get from mobs (charms of the same type can be combined for additional bonuses) that only work on "magic" or less quality item. Charms and spell scrolls can be combined with a special recipe to form an "artifact" type item, which fits a certain slot in your equipment and gives passive bonuses.
Overall, TQ is more complex than HG. HG should have extra content added in multiplayer soon though.
Gameplay
Gameplay refers to the interface's user-friendliness, the rate which you progress through the game, repetitiveness, and generally how the game doesn't feel like work. An "easy" (light) game is casual, fun and generally replayable. A "hard" (heavy) game usually makes you work or wait a lot for an item or for progress, can sometimes get frustrating, but is usually more rewarding. Note that ease of play is not related to difficulty. Examples of light games: Diablo 2 and Quake. Examples of heavy games: most MMORPGs.
HG: this is not a light game. Hellgate's ease of play can rival even that of MMOs, and is maybe one of the reasons why i didn't like it so much. You level absurdly slow, abilities don't get much boost from level to level (even if you put points in them), the levels are repetitive as hell and everything you do seems to drag along. For a hack&slash game... that's not a pretty good sight. To progress in such a game you need to really like the playstyle or the visual. I didn't find any playstyle that i really liked, since all 3 of them seem to meld into the same thing soon enough, but it may be enjoyable for someone else. Good thing the graphics are ok.
TQ: i loved how easy TQ was to play... beside the class combination, you also get 3 skill points per level instead of one, and level up pretty fast compared to HG. Both games take repairing items out of the picture, so that's a load off, TQ makes it even easier with unlimited town portal scrolls that take up no inventory space (you just press a button). Still, poor class balance in the early game can make some classes easy as pie, while others can be dreadfully hard, at least with a melee weapon.
Overall: i have to give TQ the prize here, it's much less frustrating and dull than Hellgate. If you like games that feel like work, or that challenge you to spend a lot of time farming and doing repetitive stuff, or if you are willing to bear it all just for the sci-fi theme, HG is your game.
Interaction
Interaction in single-player refers mostly to dialogue, quests and characters. In a hack&slash game, quests are the only relevant factor out of the three.
HG: quests look like they're abundant, in fact they're the incentives to enter other areas instead of the one you normally enter to progress through the main quest. Sadly, i found myself skipping through most of what the quest-givers say, because it's both monotonous and there are a crapload of lines, most of which look like they're just put there to annoy you (when the NPC say things like "hmm..." or "what did you say? where?"). Quests give both XP rewards and items/cash, though the xp reward was never that great.
TQ: not a lot of quests, TQ stays very close to Diablo 2 on this, but still, wouldn't hurt to have a few extra quests here and there, especially considering the rewards are shit except for 1 or 2 quests which give you stat and skill points. TQ has some NPCs whose only role is to talk to you, and sometimes they say interesting stuff, like a short version of greek lore so you understand better who Zeus is and where he came from (if you don't know already).
Realism
Don't expect a single bit of realism in both games, that's not the genre's forte. Items practically jump at you in HG, fleeing peasants can take a hell of a beating in TQ, well... not much to say here.
Difficulty Curve
HG: kinda steep. The game starts with mobs that don't even hit you, continues with mobs that try to hit you, and then it starts getting full of mobs that come at you in groups of 5, and not just melee mobs. The game was easy until lvl 9 or so, after that, i found that (probably) my poor choice of skills (since i didn't really know what to choose, and all i chose turned out to be useless) coupled with the mobs' rising difficulty were making it pretty hard... doable, but hard. If the game wasn't such a drag, i wouldn't have quit, but it is. To me at least.
TQ: the game keeps the difficulty in check most of the times, the mobs are usually at your level, and dispatching them isn't a problem. The problems are boss fights and hero-monster fights. Still, shouldn't be any problem for an experienced gamer, the end-chapter boss fights are actually enjoyable in that you need to apply some tactics to beat them.
AI
Both games keep up to Diablo 2 in terms of AI, which means shitty AI, so it's not enough for an in-depth analysis. The AI in TQ is more scripted than intuitive, and some mobs know how to retreat and use special attacks in HG, but that's about it.
Story
Following Diablo 2 closely, both games consist of the same character bring-up type: you start as a nobody, and become somebody.
HG: The story does its best to appear sophisticated, but it's still shallow in the end: demons attacked earth, earth lost, earth wants to win now. The intro is poorly narrated by some british chap whose only quality is the accent, and shows a young girl separated from her father who's off to fight the demons, then 20 years later (rough estimate) she's off to fight the demons as well. Of course, there must be some more depth in this, i just couldn't find it. I have no idea what relationship you have with that girl - maybe the game will tell you when you've reached the final stages.... or maybe not.
TQ: We're in ancient greece, and every monster ever depicted in lore just thought to drop in and ravage the place a bit. Humanity is cut off from the gods by 3... demigod somethings, who were imprisoned... somewhere, at some time. Now they're not imprisoned anymore, and they want to burn the whole world. Their names are Diablo, Mephisto, and... whoops, wrong game.
Apparently they were some of the Titans who got imprisoned by Cronoss for trying to be better than him, if you're into greek mythology, i know i am but the game doesn't really let you "feel" the story. The intro is better than Hellgate's, i'll give it that.
Multiplayer
The third aspect of the game, one i'm not particularly fond of but has managed to bring many games forth from the pit of obscurity. Comparing the multiplayer of these games is pretty hard since you have to pay a subscription for one of them (Hellgate) thus allowing you to play on dedicated servers, and also subscribers get extra patches with extra content and stuff (though i wouldn't pay for that crap if you gave me money for free), whereas TQ is totally free. You can play Hellgate online without subscribing however, but you still can't play it in LAN mode, unfortunately.
As for class balance and roles: Hellgate has 6 classes, none of them are so complex to warrant a healer/tank/DPS combo like you see in normal MMOs, but the skill tree is pretty well tweaked for a multiplayer game, some classes having skills that benefit the party and so forth.
TQ has a lot of classes, so multiplayer diversity is something you'll see there, you'll probably have some fun trying out different combinations too. May i add that the only tree that has healing spells in TQ can also become overpowered by stacking multiple "-%cooldown" items (there's also a skill which dramatically reduces it) thus bringing the cooldown to effectively 0, allowing the heal to be spammed continuously at almost 0 casting speed for as long as you have mana. Did i mention you can make it a chain heal?
Both games look appealing enough in multiplayer, with downsides for HG's no lan play and the nerve to ask us to pay more money to play online properly. Yet from my point of view, i'd sooner immerse myself into TQ's universe than HG's.

So there you have it, a long-ass, in-depth comparison of the two games. My goal was to make you decide which one you like more while not having actually played them, and if i reached that, then mission accomplished. If i didn't, then see ya next time.