Hellgate: London combines role-playing game mechanics with first-person shooter gameplay. Although the game looks and plays much like a first-person shooter, characters do level up, receive points to spend into skills or character statistics.

While it has been stated on the PC Gamer magazine that Hellgate: London will support Windows Vista and DirectX 10, Flagship Studios has made repeated statements that the game will run perfectly well on Windows XP and DirectX 9 based systems. The game is said to be capable of running just as easily on computers as old as 4 years with some settings disabled.