We've all heard the phrase at least a dozen times in our video gaming lives. It's been a right hook to the gut of PC gaming; a reason to resent publishers that force games out to meet a deadline, or scold developers that seemingly choose to ship unfinished games. It's a crutch that we'd all rather see kicked out from under the industry.

That being said, I ended my Hellgate: London preview by expressing the hope that Flagship could polish its apocalyptic RPG enough by launch to let its addictive core shine. Because there is a lot of fun somewhere in there--it just needed to be brought out, enhanced, streamlined. A few changes were indeed made between beta and release, but not nearly enough of them. Not even close.

As it stands, Hellgate is merely an average effort. It's one of those games that will undoubtedly receive a handful of half-hearted 8s, like when your first girlfriend in 9th grade asked you for an honest appraisal, but you just didn't have the scones to tell her the truth. Though it may be unfair to judge a game based on expectations, clearly this project had plenty of talent behind it, and the potential to be the stand-out product we all had hoped for. And in truth, the foundation of Hellgate is a strong one. It's just missing a coat of paint or two. And a second floor.

Ship now, patch later.

It's really too bad that Flagship is in this predicament, because Hellgate does do a lot of things better than its competitors. Clearly Bill Roper and the rest of his team had some fresh ideas going into development. Hellgate tries to bring the hellish setting of Diablo into the future, both in design and in setting. It ditches Battle.net for in-game town hubs, where you can meet up and assemble into groups of five before tackling the connected dungeons. It introduces 3D graphics, adds a more personalized avatar system, crams in some FPS-style action, and mixes it all together with a few innovative evolutions to usual dungeon-crawling conventions.

A lot of this stuff works, and works quite well. The combat, a requisite to any great action RPG, is well executed for the most part. Beating up on zombies, hell-dogs, and the game's massive bosses is a good deal of fun. Zombies give way to your sword swings with gratifying crunches, and grenade blasts splatter demons to and fro in delightfully tight bunches. At least one part of Diablo's addictive nature is intact, and with the shift to 3D first and third person views--both equally enjoyable to use--it is successful in moving the formula forward in that respect.

There's also a vast amount of player-specific loot doled out after each kill, spilled all over the ground in a satisfying pile. Flagship did some critical thinking here too, and a vacuum-like pickup system allows it to all be gathered with a few taps of the "F" key. Once you have this loot on hand, you can upgrade any weapon through the various modification systems available. Your favorite sword can instantly be leveled up with a costly random attribute machine--reminiscent of Charsi the blacksmith's reward in Diablo 2--or buffed by several types of relic-like mods.

Dealing with the piles of crap you find on your adventures has been addressed as well. Now when you identify items in the field that you can't use, you can simply disassemble them into a set of smaller basic parts, saving on precious inventory space. These parts can then be used toward crafting specific weapon upgrades. A small radial menu, brought up by simply holding down the right mouse button on an item, allows all of this to be done with relative ease.

Unfortunately, for every good thing that Hellgate does, it commits an equally pronounced sin.

Yes, you can modify your weapons to your heart's desire--but after a few minutes of slotting swords with mods, you'll have more statistics staring you in the face than you know what to do with. One large number, a general damage rating, stands above it all--but this number doesn't refer to your damage-per-second, or any other easily decipherable math. The reason for this is that each weapon can do a different type of damage, be it physical, spectral, fire, electrical, or toxic. Depending on what types of damage it's dealing, you'll be doing more or less damage against particular types of enemies. This makes it fairly difficult to determine just where you stand in terms of real battle effectiveness--and when the whole game is based around fast-paced action, requiring a calculator to decide on your next move is anything but intuitive.

There are plenty of items and weapon mods available, but their overly-detailed graphical icons aren't distinct enough to stand out in a large merchant display, requiring you to slowly scroll over every item to figure just what it is you're about to buy. By point of comparison, Diablo's town portal scrolls were immediately recognizable, but Hellgate's personal relocators are small, undistinguished objects. Compounding this issue is a bug: when dropping items from one menu to the next, the item graphic will often appear as being in your hand, even though it has since been dropped. For these reasons, handling items becomes a sticky, awkward business, that can often lead to frustration.

Characters in the world appear visually distinct, but in general, Hellgate does little to impress on the graphical side of things. While the environments are littered with cool exploding barrels and interactive effects, they're also bland and repetitive to the extreme, never managing to captivate or deliver on the promise of a truly hellish atmosphere. Diablo 2 may have had similarly repetitive settings, but that game had more spark and craftsmanship in an inch of pixels than can be found within entire levels of Hellgate. It's all randomly assorted ashen subways, marble hallways, drab castles, and crimson, smoky hell zones--and none of it is interesting, artistically or architecturally. Perhaps the reason for this is the focus on randomization, but in the end, the reason is irrelevant. The developers have made more promises to improve the scenery in the future, but that's then. This is now.

Ship now, patch later.

Piecemeal also conveniently describes Hellgate's score, a strange selection of uninspiring beats that automatically strike up during events. Or they try to. Sometimes the music timing is way off, and a high-tempo track will kick in before you ever see an enemy, or after a battle is already over. Either way, these music selections are far too brief, and don't serve to really enhance the game in any meaningful way.

Speaking of ineffective features, the chat and social interfaces have to be some of the worst to hit the genre. Not only is the chat window ugly, it's also obtrusive, either stuck in your way or completely hidden. The grouping system is functional enough for questing--gathering a group together is as easy as dropping an automatic portal to eachother--but actually tracking your friends is a chore. The game requires both players to be online before you can even add them to your friend list. And why is there no LAN play included for offline characters?

Maybe the most significant failing of Hellgate is its inability to present any sort of serviceable dialogue or coherent story. The NPCs are utterly dull and unmemorable, save one or two exceptions. Hellgate has no Deckard Cain, or even a Diablo--no immediately interesting heroes or villains, other than zombies. We know those are bad.

Most quests are of the standard MMO fetch-and-kill type, with a few storyline offerings that break up the monotony. As almost none of this story is interesting enough to sit and read through, you'll be skipping by most of it, and after hours of this, the game begins to blur together. Without any sense of purpose, you're just endlessly repeating World of Warcraft-style quests, complete with question marks and exclamation points hovering overtop the subway towns' NPC villagers. The promise of more treasure is enough to keep you going for quite a while, but this inevitably gets old. I never thought I'd play a game that made me yearn for the bullshit "lore" of World of Warcraft, but here it is anyway.

The six included character classes are nothing new. Players will have the Blademaster, Guardian, Evoker, Summoner, Engineer, and Marksman to choose from at their starting screen. Essentially these six can be categorized into three pairs, with magic, melee, and rifle classes being broken into two variants. It's a solid, focused assortment, but ultimately unexciting. Whereas you were always striving to get that next awesome talent in Diablo 2, Hellgate's class skills play more of a subtle supporting role. By that I mean they are mostly boring.

There are also some class imbalances, and a few broken skills. For instance, playing as the close-quarters, sword-swinging Blademaster is much more difficult at earlier levels than a class that can stand back and shoot from safety. When playing as the rifle-shooting, pet bot-spawning Engineer, you can gift weapons to your mechanical friend in order to have him act in your defense, which is pretty cool--until the dumb bastard runs off after a zombie like a dog chasing a car, and promptly gets himself killed. Of course, after logging out, the bot's weapons will completely disappear, lost forever. This is a bug that has been reported for months, and gone unfixed into retail.

Ship now, patch later.

And hopefully these patches come sooner, rather than later. Though DirectX 10 performance has improved somewhat since beta, "memory exhausted" crashes still plague both clients, rendering it near-impossible to stay in the game longer than an hour or two. Your experience may vary, but enough players are expressing similar issues that it is definitely a widespread phenomenon. Beyond the crashes, many other random glitches still persist, including one where only players' armor and weapons load after entering a zone--unless turning people into ghosts was part of the kooky Halloween content.

I was initially more than enthusiastic about Hellgate. After spending a few hours in the beta, I was absolutely hooked. But after another few hours, and a lengthy once-over post-launch, I can say that I am off the hook--at least temporarily. The frustration of playing a buggy game that is screaming for core feature additions is too much of a hassle in this busy season of gaming.

Hellgate could be great. It still can be. My advice?

Wait now, buy later.