So a while back a game released on the PC and it was, not universally panned, but constantly compared to the game that came before a game that was one of the best games released in the nineties for the PC. My inner Blizzard fanboy might be peeking out on that but whatever. I'm talking of course about the Diablo games recently the third installment of this series made its way to the console and I had the opportunity to try it out. Follow the jump to defeat the great evil.
Well Diablo 3 follows its forebear of being a hack and slash dungeon crawler. The whole point of the game of course is to find all the demons and complete the story but to do so you have to navigate all kinds of randomly laid out dungeons where the boss isn't where you might have left him on your first playthrough. During this you unlock sills and find new and interesting gear to equip your chosen hero with. 3 has five classes, Barbarian, which takes the fighter slot as a big hulking damage taker and dealer, Monk, the other frontline class which does damage . . .and that was about as much as I could see. The Demon hunter which is a ranged bow user and I think its supposed to be a heavy damage dealer but I didn't see any of that on my use of it. Finally two mage classes, the voodoo priest and the sorcerer round out the classes. The choice of class determines the narrative that your character brings to the story but does nothing to alter the story because Blizzard wanted to deliver a very specific one to the player.
The story begins as a meteor has fallen on a town and now the dead are rising all around the site. Your character has shown up because of whatever reason they have to investigate. From the very start upon your arrival in the town your character is pulled into a battle against the forces of hell and the attempt to save the entire human race from extinction. Not really a shock to anyone who has played a Diablo game before.
Now that my overview is complete lets talk a bit about the game and the things that I felt might need work. From the start since it is a hack and slash game there is some repeating gameplay and I felt while the graphics were good it sometimes felt as though they just didn't have enough variety early on in the monsters and that never really felt like it changed. Compared to Diablo 2 which also had a lot of reskinned and not different monsters it made that work by interspersing different monster types within the same groups as others. So while in Diablo 3 you are always fighting the same three or four zombies in 2 you would be fighting zombies with fallen with quillbeasts and spiders in the same room. Does that make the game bad? No not really but it felt like a wasted opportunity especially within the dungeons. I understand that the first boss is the Skeleton King but come on guys! The combat is all about hitting a routine by finding the combination of available skills work best but since you don't start off with all of your skill types unlocked and they remain locked off until a predetermined point it might be more accurate to say its about getting through until you have these options opened up. Now Diablo 2 had an approach like that but since you were limited in options to the two mouse buttons and with a skill tree it felt like you had more control over your character than there is in 3. Consider this; in Diablo three there are about 15 active skills per character along with several passive skills. In 2 there were about that many skills PER tree and each character had three trees that they could use. It gave the player the control to play a summoner druid or a shapeshifting druid while three feels really limited. Character choice aside the story is something that I have in my crosshairs so lets make the jump.
Diablo 3 starts off so promising with the fully animated cinematics to start things off and the narration from your chosen character class but later in the game it feels like it loses steam. While this might be just a feeling that I had it felt that I spent the vast majority of the game in the first act while the other three just began a downhill run that ended with them becoming shorter and shorter. It felt rushed like the whole game was supposed to have these kinds of long arcs because again I'm going back to 2 here each of the acts in that game had a more structured six quests that once complete, the final one was always kill the demon lord, you were finished with the act and moved on. My point is each level felt like an entire experience in hunting each one of these evils down and killing them off while Three feels like it is leading up to just one climax which in my opinion was a let down.
Spoilers!
Now here I'm going to talk about some of the moments that drove me nuts. First there is really only one moment that felt like the kind of great evil boss I'm supposed to be taking on. That giant thing in the Diablo Three commercial? Second act boss. The other bosses in the game while they are very Diablo 2 felt off. The Skeleton king didn't but that was because I hadn't fought the other one yet. My point is that if you are going to make a multi-phase boss make it the last one. Comparatively the killing of Diablo is kind of pathetic. I remember when I first killed him in Diablo 2 it was an epic marathon of just watching the health bar slowly creeping down and weathering the deaths of my character to go at him again. This one I beat him handily on my first try and was left unsatisfied. "Really?" I asked, "that's it?" This is the problem that stems from a lot. Here is Diablo a character that is supposed to be the baddest ass of them all and he is dropped easily by a human despite handily crushing an Archangel. I understand that I'm the hero of the story but why not make me freaking earn that win?
Is Diablo three a bad game? No I wouldn't go that far but it is fairly mediocre when compared to many other available games out right now. It gave me the same kind of feeling I had when sitting with a few friends and chilling with Baldur's Gate or Gautlet Legends. Fun for a while and with people to kill some time working together but it won't light the world on fire. Compared to Blizzard's other recent release it falls flat. It's a pretty game when it isn't darker than hell with the lights off but other than my listed issues it's functional and if you need a time-killer there are worse options. I don't know if it is multiplayer on console, by which I mean a bunch of buddies on a couch because I never got a chance to test that out so take that for what its worth.
I'm going to start putting what I think the game would be worth to purchase based on what I personally had fun with. Take it for what its worth, which means not much in my case.
Final rating 20$ out of 60$
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