Diablo II

The Good
In 2000, Diablo II, the long awaited sequel to Diablo hit store shelves. Considering how bad Diablo was it is surprising it sold well enough to warrant a sequel. Fortunately Diablo II is a much better game.

In Diablo II, the lord of terror lives! After his defeat at the hands of a young warrior, Diablo is reborn using the very soul of the warrior that dealt him his deathblow! Now Diablo is heading east to awaken his brothers. You cannot let this come to pass, if the three prime evils walk the earth, the world will surely be doomed.

In Diablo II you can play as five different warriors. The Amazon, The Necromancer, The Barbarian, The Sorceress, and The Paladin. The characters are not identical and all play quite differently. The Paladin and Barbarian are the easier, while the Amazon, Necromancer, and Sorceress are for an extra challenge. My personal favorite was the Necromancer. If you play him right he can also be quite a capable fighter, and become a fighting Necromancer.

The plot unfolds during amazing looking cut scenes. But other than that the plot is pretty non-existent. There are four Acts, each Act contains six quests, so there are a total of 24 quests. So this game is quite long this is both a good and bad thing. More on the bad later. The game can be quite fun and it is always rewarding when your warrior levels up.

Unlike Diablo, which only contained four dungeons, Diablo II has too many dungeons to count. There is also more than one main hub. The town changes with every new Act. One of the coolest is the large desert town of Act II. One of the worst is the jungle of Act III, the design is interesting, but the area has some really annoying enemies.

Some familiar faces return to help you. Like Cain, who sounds suspiciously like Sean Connery. There are many new features in Diablo II. One of the most unique is the use of The Horadrum Cube. You gain this item about midway through the game. It is a magic cube that lets you make items. You just place the components in the cube, and it makes a new item. Unfortunately the game does not provide a master list of things you can create. You either have to experiment like the game makers intended or get the info of the Internet, like most people did. You can also power up a slotted weapon by adding a gem, these add various effects and are permanent. There is also a skill system that was sorely lacking in the original game. Each Warrior has there own skill set.

The videos and voiceovers are amazing. The production values are high here. As they should be considering how much money Blizzard has. The graphics overall are a bit dated. They were dated in 2000! There are very few bugs, which is rare indeed.

The Bad
This game has got to be the only schizophrenic game I have every played. One minute you are loving it, the next you feel bogged down by repetition. Sometimes you just want hurry things up, but the game refuses to yield. Act III sucks. The monsters here are a huge pain in the ass. How many nights I cursed the jungles of Diablo II. It is the single worst area of any game I can think of. Diablo II is also very light on the RPG elements. Whereas most PC RPGS are very customizable, Diablo II’s only customization is what your warrior wears and what skills they learn. Pretty lame. Why is Blizzard considered such a great game maker? Black Isle, Ion Storm, and Looking Glass are all defunct, while all of there games were great. Blizzard, only has one excellent game World of Warcraft, but they still get to make games.

The Bottom Line
Fans of Diablo will love this game. As it is much better. RPG fans would have more fun with games like, Planscape Torment, Return to Krondor, or Oblivion.

The Good
It seems that so little people actually take the time to rate these games after they review them here on Mobygames. This makes for some rather inaccurate scores (though at the time of writing it, the 3.9 seems pretty much what I'd give it). With so many reviews written, another review would probably just add to the pile and not be worth much, but due to the lack of people rating the games, I don't feel that would suffice as a good contribution. So, rather than making a lengthy review about this game, I'll just go down the list of things I liked and disliked about this game. It's another person's opinion on the game, but nothing more.

Now, for the good.

I'll start by saying I loved Diablo. I still love Diablo. At the time, before I grew up, it seemed like the greatest game ever made. Imagine...every time you begin a new game, every level of the dungeon is different. You'll never know what kind of weapons you'll find. The combinations seemed endless. You work a little harder with every level you visit, descending deeper and deeper into Diablo's dungeon, getting more powerful and battling more powerful enemies until you meet the big man himself.

Ever since I beat Diablo for the eleventh time, I've wanted a sequel. The ending of the first was odd, and who didn't like the idea that you weren't stuck in a single town?

Well, Diablo II came and a lot of our prayers were answered. This time you were not stuck in one single town, one long ever-deepening dungeon. This time, you faced off against monsters in the forests, the deserts, swamps, dungeons, prisons, abandoned temples...the list goes on. With more monsters than you can shake your staff at and more weapons than you'll know what to do with.

Along with the expanded game world (and oh is it expanded), you get more character classes to choose from, and each one has its own set of advantages, along with unique skills they can get.

Also, you won't have to worry about not being strong enough to fight the next area, because every time you exit the game, the monsters come back.

There's no more foul trickery by saving and loading in order to get an advantage over the enemy. No saving-then-scout-ahead-and-load-back-after-you-get-your-ass-kicked. The only saving you'll do is when you exit. Otherwise, you'll respawn back at a waypoint and will have to go retrieve your corpse. I felt this really added to the thrill of gameplay.

The game remained in 2D, which I particularly liked. I feel that 3D technology hasn't quite evolved enough to take the place over good ol' 2D RPGs. But there's this "perspective" psuedo-3D view style which...well, is odd. Some people, like me, dislike it, but other people -- most people enjoy it, so I'll list it in the "good".

The lighting effects are nice. The bosses can be entertaining and their deaths are usually dramatic and bloody.

Revisiting old friends from Diablo 1 was my favorite part of the game, even if it was sad outcome.

The cinematics rock! Some of the best I've ever seen.

Stamina plays a part in this game, which is good.

The Bad
Now for the bad.

Despite being in 2D, the graphics weren't that good. The water looked goofy in most areas, the monsters were often times indistinguishable and the running animation wasn't that good.

The game is repetetive. Of course, it's unfair to say that, because the gameplay hasn't changed at all since Diablo 1. But there was a huge difference between the two. In Diablo 1, you cleared out a dungeon and went down further. Clear out a dungeon, go down further. Diablo 1 wasn't an RPG - it was an arcade game with RPG elements. Diablo 2 isn't the same. Diablo 2 involves lots of "go allllll the way over here, killing everything in the way, kill this thing, then go allllllll the way over here, then allllllll the way over here, then come back and then you progress". It gets extremely old, extremely quick. I found myself forcing myself through many areas just so that I could hurry up and kill whatever it was I was sent to kill and go back to progress the story a bit.

In Diablo 1, you were an errand boy. If Cain or that blacksmith guy wanted you to do a task, you'd do it, because it was on your way and you'd get a reward and it was for the good of the town. But in Diablo 2, you're everybody's errand boy because they always want you to prove your worth. "Sure, I'll help you, if you go and do these things for me," they might as well say. And you have to do a number of errands for every town you go along on your way. Not for the good of the town, not to fight evil, but just to get people to tell you something.

While I thought that, when you leave the game the monsters respawn was a neat idea, it's really only a neat idea if you're enjoying the game. For me, I couldn't play for more than twenty minutes before I'd get bored and leave. And whenever I'd come back, sure enough I'd have to hack my way through an army of bad guys. And what was an aggrivating cycle, is that, I would hack through a bunch of enemies to reach a point, then leave. When I came back, I'd have to hack through the army again, then get bored. The cycle went on, making my progress in the game verrrrry slow. But at least I was uber powerful by the time I got anywhere. Heh.

Since monsters can't follow you out of dungeons, they became pretty easy. Fight the monster, leave the dungeon, recharge, go back in, etc.

The weapon characteristics aren't nearly as interesting as they were in Diablo. In Diablo, sometimes you'd get a weapon WAY ahead of your level. It rocked, but it was rare. Maybe it's just as rare in Diablo 2, but I can't remember ever getting a weapon that wasn't just appropriate for my level unless I bought it myself.

Dungeon plunging is boring, since you'll never find anything worth keeping.

To summarize, Diablo II just was very boring and repetetive. If anything unique in the game came along (that is, something other than the massive hordes of enemies you'd spend an hour slaughtering before reaching somewhere), it came along far too late to keep me interested. The graphics were hardly an improvement over Diablo 1, and...well, frankly, it completely lost the feel of the classic original.

The Bottom Line
It has some good stuff in it. Big fans of the original should pick it up just to extend the story. The cinematics are probably the best feature of the game.

Otherwise...disappointing, repetetive, aggrivating, slow, boring.

The Good
Let me start with the game's greatest single point: It's easy to play. Okay? Got that. The simple "click on an enemy to attack" style of play (for most classes) will ensure that this game is easy to pick up and go with...

From the opening introduction cinematics to wandering into dungeons to gaining new skills and fighting a swarm of zombies... the atmosphere of this game is heavy and hangs in the air throughout the game. Most levels are beautifully designed, which is all the more impressive when you realize that they're randomly generated when you begin them. The characters in each of the towns are fairly unique and have both serious and humorous dialog.

There's a lot of unique items to be found. Collector gamers should have a lot of fun here, especially when updating to the latest version makes even more unique and Set (as in "part of a set..") items available.

The Bad
My main complain about this game is that it's long and for your efforts... well, I did not feel it reached a satisfying conclusion. I don't like to put spoilers in a review, but let me just say that the final act of the game was disappointing to me in every way (to be fair, I think I did feel that same way regarding the final levels of the first Diablo title).

There's a LOT of story in the cinematics and the dialog with characters but unfortunately, that's the only place it is... and it seems much too short. Speaking of dialog, characters seem to have different things to say "right when you're assigned a quest" and "later on when you're working on your quest"... that means that if you happen to miss talking to a character, you can end up never hearing one of their pieces of dialog.

Your character updates their image when they put on different types of armor/helmet/shield... but there are really only a couple of graphics for each type. For a game with so many hard-coded items and many randomly generating ones... it seems a disappointment that so many of them look the same.

This game is hack n slash. That's all it is. If you're like me, sometime during the Third Act you'll realize "hey, that's all there is" and might start playing less. During the final level you won't even have much of a storyline to contend with... just a long, slow Boss Crawl to the final showdown...

The most disturbing moment of the game is Tristam IMO... if only because I knew some of the characters from Diablo1.

The Bottom Line
The cutscenes are pretty. The cutting down enemies is fun... until it gets repetitive.

Simple Hack N Slash. Play by yourself or team up over LAN/Internet to have a proper adventuring party. Cut down monsters. Collect and sell items... and... that's it.

The cutscenes are fantastic, but don't depend on them because each lasts only a short while and frequently what you just saw did not apply to the game.