Diablo II

The Good
Diablo 2 is ridiculously compelling. The combination of scenery changes and character progression will keep your mouse finger clicking for months, if you let it. Multiplayer (with friends, not necessarily online) is great fun, as the various combinations of character type create havoc: Blizzard wisely made it very hard to do one-sided player kills, as the possibilities for (non) co-operation are extensive...

The Bad
Diablo 2 displays a very interesting characteristic: it's an almost completely skill-less game. All that's really involved in progressing are lots of playing hours and mouse clicking. Once you realise this (after several months), the enjoyment becomes a bit tortuous. As computer entertainment, Diablo 2 is a pinnacle of what the old folks tell you - it's just about the ultimate waste of time.

The Bottom Line
Diablo 2 is best enjoyed as a relaxing way to go adventuring with friends. It's extremely good at what it does, which is keeping the player hooked and excited at a low level of brain activity. The atmosphere is incredible, and as a halfway substitute for gaming and tv watching combined, Diablo 2 is in a class of its own.

The Good
Blizzard has demonstrated time and time again that they are a creatively-bankrupt publisher. The entire concept of their first popular game, Warcraft, was lifted wholesale from Westwood's groundbreaking Dune II. World of Warcraft is a shameless EverQuest clone. And while Diablo doesn't borrow from any one particular game, the gameplay is so dull, repetitive, and dreary that we should probably regard Blizzard more as a manufacturer of intro movies and cutscenes rather than a real gaming powerhouse.

Which of course brings me to the sole stand-out feature of Diablo II: the movies. The quality of the CG, the direction, the cinematography, the music, the horror of the demonic antagonists, these all tell me that Blizzard would do well to open a Hollywood studio and concentrate on film. One particular scene with the demon Baal fighting an archangel stands out in my mind as the best cutscene in the history of video games.

The Bad
This is a dull, tedious hack-and-slash affair. The gameplay is more suited to the 1980s when monotony was about all you could expect from a video game. Two years after BioWare released the deep, rich, and compelling Baldur's Gate, Diablo II is a sad reminder that some developers of marque titles really do not put a premium on innovation, as they by all accounts should.

The Bottom Line
With all that in mind, the production values of Diablo II are high, which no doubt explains why it was such a commercial, if not critical success. Still, the fact that we haven't seen a Diablo III speaks volumes: this style of gameplay is a relic of past.

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.