Diablo II

The Good
Every now and then, you like to relax you brain with a "stupid" game. Kill everything, collect gold, get better equipment... that kind of stuff. Diablo II provides such a gameplay.
Graphics are not stunning, but more than decent
Sound effects and music are as spooky as they should
The pre-rendered movies are cool
The environment is random... which adds replayability (but only in the unlikely event you want to actually go through the game again)

The Bad
Diablo II is long, and that's good, but every part of the game is the same with different graphics. The gameplay is just too repetitive to entertain you until it ends. I gave up just before reaching the middle of the game.
Some character classes suck when they should be great. Take the necromancer : it sounds cool : command an army of squeletons and golems. Yeah, but either your "army" is too weak and will be of absolutely no use, or it is strong enough and then the game is just about walking and watching your squeletons kill the enemies, which is such a dull experience.
The environment is random, which means... that no-one puts any design in them. So some parts of the game will end up being too easy, while others will be frustratingly impossible to venture through.


The Bottom Line
Diablo II sounds fun, and at first, it is great fun.
But it fails to be an entertaining experience in the long run because of its repetitive gameplay and lack of balance.

The Good
New skill-system with new spells/skills. They kind of dumped the old "You are a sorceress, here are your spells" and instead allow you to pick what kind of sorceress you want to be (fire, ice, electric). Same with barbarians, necromancers, etc. Just the fact that they changed the classes was a good improvement.

Much of the game is above-ground. You get out of the dungeon often, and it's kind of nice to be able to roam about a sprawling land.

Interesting things to keep you looking (like sets of armor, socketed weapons and armor). Sometimes this gets annoying trying to figure out which belt works better or which sheild is better, but overall it's good.

The Bad
Graphics. What is this hard-coded 640x480 stuff in the post 20th century? It's technical requirements really were all that was required AND necessary. A better PC won't make the game much better visually. WarCraft 2 looks better on my 21" monitor than Diablo 2.

If you like story line, this is not your game. This is pure hack and slash. Your fingers will go numb after all the clicking.

I question the balance to this game. I felt like all the developers did was boost the HPs of everything towards the end of the game. I didn't see "ingenious" uses of the magic in the game, and sometimes I felt like the AI was cheating (like they all had one set of shared eyeballs). Other times they couldn't figure out how to walk around an obstacle.

The Bottom Line
Overall, it's still a good game, but I prefer the original to this one. It's probably worth the lower price it should be going for nowadays, and all the changes to the game should keep you playing for quite some time. Towards the end of the game you'll be more driven to "Finish the damn thing" than anything else.

I hear the multiplayer on-line is pretty good, too, but I don't have high speed internet, so... .

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.