Summary
Fleurs du mal
The Good
I was under a strong influence of MAT's romantic review called "From The Darkness Of My Heart" (see below in reviews to this game) when I decided to sit down and to understand the secret behind "Diablo", which always seemed to me, an adventurer and role-player, just a meaningless, violent, boring hack & slash action game. I already played the
Diablo II sequel (I don't know why I have this strange habit of starting with sequels), and I wasn't very impressed. After having read the aforementioned review, I bravely sat down and installed this first "Diablo", mumbling: "Let's see what he was talking about".
As soon as I started, I discovered the game's "secret": it is extremely easy to get sucked into. The character creation is minimal, the combat is real-time, and the gameplay is intuitive and physical. Click on the mouse and kill the enemies, then take stuff from them and climb to the next level - this is all. This is a game that you can play without even noticing you have been playing. It is as if it takes the mouse out of your hands and turns you into a mindless zombie that has to follow its orders.
The simplicity of the game made the learning curve practically non-existent: you are drawn with force into the game, and the action begins immediately. Once you are in the game, it's very difficult to get out of it. The easy fights and the constant discovery of gold and other things makes you want more, and more, and more. You become greedy. You get addicted.
The graphics and the music create a definitive romantic atmosphere. As primitive as the gameplay is, the graphics are rather fine. I liked the abundance of grey and brown - bright or over-exaggerated dark colors would spoil the atmosphere. I even preferred those graphics to the more clean, crisp looks of the sequel.
The music was the part of the game I especially enjoyed - very moody, dark-romantic. Enveloped into this atmosphere, I ventured forth to slay minions of random evil skeletons and to collect heaps of random gold...
The Bad
At a certain point, I just had to say "no". I was disappointed, but I had to admit: my first impression was right. At first, I thought it was a primitive, repetitive game. And it really is. It has appealing sides, but it sorely lacks depth, versatility, or anything resembling content.
Apart from killing, you do nothing. The NPCs are nothing more than mere information sources - they have no personality, although the dialogues (or, more exactly, the phrases the NPCs say, because you don't really participate in a dialogue) are nicely written and the voice acting is not very terrible. It is not difficult to notice that absolutely everything in this game is sacrificed to the monotonous gameplay. The core of the game isn't the fights - it is the act of killing itself.
I spent hours with this game, but when I finally left it in peace, I had a bad feeling. It depressed me to be alone in a dungeon killing skeletons and not having one living soul to speak to. The NPCs in the town? You can forget about them. It was the same experience all the time. It was boring.
The whole random-ness of the game really killed the experience for me. There are no memorable locations or situations, simply because, strictly speaking, there are no real locations or situations at all. Everything is randomly generated, you cannot get attached to anything encountered in the game, because next time it won't be there.
Needles to say "Diablo" has no real story line worth mentioning. It all boils down to descending deeper and deeper into the dungeon and killing bigger and badder guys. "Diablo" is a descendant of old dungeon crawlers such as
Rogue. You would think that all those years separating the two games would make a difference. But expect the graphical update, "Diablo" is hardly much more advanced than "Rogue". It is the same random dungeon crawling with graphics and real-time combat; a stone-age title without any extras. It is as if game development had been frozen in time when it was made.
"Diablo" called itself a role-playing game, but there is no role-playing here to speak of. You kill things and become more powerful, that's all. There is no strategy in battles except gulping health potions while hacking away at enemies. There are no parameters to raise except what is needed for combat. There is of course no party, no disciplines, race differences, or anything of the kind.
And in one aspect "Diablo" is inferior to its sequel: its world is too small. Your exploring is reduced to the infinite fights in the dungeon. It's really nice to see how much gold a skeleton carries inside his skull, but to spend a whole game on it is just exaggerated.
The Bottom Line
+ Good atmosphere
+ Addictive
- Monotonous and repetitive
- No story, no dialogues, no content
- No real role-playing
- Only one location
- Everything is random
It's easy to get addicted to the atmosphere and the monotonous skeleton-bashing, gold-collecting gameplay of "Diablo". But at some point, you'll realize there is nothing else in this game. It can be fun for a while, but its lack of content and its extremely repetitive, mindless gameplay make it little more than a fancy version of old-fashioned dungeon crawlers.
