Summary
Great design wasted on boring gameplay
The Good
I like this game. There were times when I hated it. There were times when I loved it. It definitely has something that kept attracting and repulsing me, sometimes at the same time. From technical point of view, this is definitely a fine package. The CG video sequences are breathtaking, and I mean it. Alone the intro is among the best ones I ever saw in a game. In general, the design is excellent, the locations are atmospheric and are finely crafted, with a lot of attention to detail.
Contrary to the popular opinion, I find the game's in-game graphics quite good. The characters are large, the backgrounds are clear and vibrant. The monster design is excellent, you'll encounter a great variety of monsters, from the traditional zombies and skeletons to crazy monkeys and insane shamans. The monsters look all cool, and the feeling of horror when being attacked by a twenty of them at a time is quite genuine.
The sound effects are very good, but the best part of the game is its music. Already the original
Diablo introduced some fantastic tunes - well, this one has more of them. From the dark, gothic pieces of the first act, to oriental melodies of Lut Gholein and the macabre sounds of hell.
Unlike the first "Diablo", where you were stuck in the same location all the time, "Diablo II" offers much more variety. Especially refreshing is the fact you won't be crawling through dungeons all the time. There are plenty of open-air areas, mountains, deserts, and fields, just for you to do your bloody deeds.
"Diablo II" is great in satisfying our collector's instinct. The game can be very addictive when you try to gather all possible items and to make your character as strong as possible. Since the monsters bring you experience, there is actually some sense in killing them, and if all you need from a game is developing an ultra-powerful, ultra-smashing son of a bitch, you'll have many happy hours with "Diablo II".
Overall, "Diablo II" can really attract you for a while, it is definitely well-made and beautifully designed, and it can hold your interest until...
The Bad
...until you have no interest any more. For a long time I was trying to understand what the hell was the meaning of the whole thing, and finally I understood: there was no meaning. If you crossed a tiger with a dog, you still wouldn't get such a disproportional creature. "Diablo II" is in fact nothing more than an awkward compilation of great FMV sequences, that actually try to tell us something, and the game itself, that doesn't tell us anything, and I mean: anything at all. Now I have nothing against cut scenes which are there to advance the story, but in "Diablo II" they advance only the story that was told by the previous cut scene, and not what we have done in the game itself. This is ridiculous mainly because the story, as simple and as uncomplicated as it might be, could have improved the game greatly, were it connected to it in this or another way. But instead, "Diablo II" develops this way: a story is told during a movie, then we play something entirely different, hacking and slashing to the right and to the left, killing everything, killing a big boss... and get another movie that continues the first one. But hey, it's not that important, you would say, because we don't play "Diablo II" for its story, we play it for its gameplay, right? Well, the gameplay... how to put it mildly... sucks. Never before I saw in a game (and I don't count such masterpieces of stupidity like
Doom or similar products as games) such a ridiculous amount of boring, repetitive gameplay. The first act is actually okay. You wander around, do silly quests, collect items, loot, kill, and see your strength or dexterity or anything else grow peacefully upwards. Fine. Then comes the second act. Another location - same gameplay. Act 3 - a different location, yet the same gameplay all the time! Kill, kill, and kill - nothing more! The NPCs serve only as sources for items or quests. The quests are devoid of imagination, are blatantly obvious as mere sources for a better weapon or item, and are extremely tedious. Except for killing things and collecting items you really do nothing in this game. Literally. There is not even one single puzzle. There is not a single NPC encounter that is actually memorable. There is no actual SITUATIONS, because everything is random and everything is intended to be there with one sole purpose: to satisfy our greed for blood, money, and expensive things. The combat is idiotically simplistic and involves nothing but frantic button-mashing. There are no strategies in combat that go beyond equipping an ice-based weapon against a fire-based monster. Clicking the two mouse buttons trying to hit the enemy or to pick up an item will be the only thing you'll be doing in the game. Really.
Maybe "Diablo II" has a value as a RPG? Well, I would say that "Pacman" has a deeper role-playing system than this game. Yes, you can choose what stats to increase, but that is all. Not to mention the stats have only importance to fighting characters. There is nothing that can influence, for example, your conversations with NPCs, or anything else in the game. I could understand this by console RPGs, that usually offer us shallow role-playing, but some serious story-telling instead. But "Diablo II" delivers neither. If you think role-playing is constantly making your bloodthirsty character even more fearsome and brutal, then perhaps this game is for you. In any case, if you wish role-playing, there is only one role to play here.
Then there are minor things. I know "Diablo II" is actually a clone of those old ASCII dungeon crawlers with random generators, but this game tries to tell us a story (if it didn't, why are there those videos?), and I don't understand how can a story go together with random locations, random items, random enemies, and random everything. Maybe it works for some people, but I disliked this random generator a lot. There is no possibility you get attached to a certain location, and say, for example: "Wow, here was that place where I fought four maggots and twelve zombies, and found that great spear you can insert a ruby into". Next time you play the game, this particular location won't exist.
In addition, "Diablo II" features a very uncomfortable and confusing dying/saving system. If you die, you wind up in a town again, with your health replenished, and all you have to do is to go and to collect your inventory at the place you fell. I found that the best strategy against tough bosses was to accumulate as many weapons and equipment as possible, then hit the boss until you die, take another equipment from a chest you always have available in town, go to the boss again, hit him again, etc. The boss won't heal all this time. Very realistic, indeed... and if you exit the game and continue from a saved file, all the monsters will respawn. This is their way of letting us gaining more experience... as much as I dislike random battles, they are still a much more intelligent system than this one.
Finally, upon seeing "Diablo II" historically, we see it is nothing more but an expanded version of the original
Diablo. If the original were a great game, that would be fine. But just like the original was a boring, repetitive dungeon crawl, so is the second game. It would be still an OK game were it not so shamelessly long. Alone the first act would be enough for a game with such a monotonous gameplay. At least the first game maintained proportions in this length aspect.
The Bottom Line
Overrated, or better to say - overhyped. "Diablo II" is actually just a fancy dungeon crawler, a graphically advanced version of
Nethack. I still have a soft spot for it, because it has beautiful music, excellent graphics, fantastic CG movies, and good atmosphere. It could have been a great game, but the lack of any content and the impossibly repetitive gameplay ruin it all.
