Diablo II

The Good
There were a number of things to like about this game.

• The number of items and skills was vast. With the random nature of the items, there were a seemingly endless number of ways to equip your character.

• The different classes. Unlike the first Diablo, each class was quite different from the other classes. As well, Blizzard put enough time into this game to allow each class to have a wide range of different ways to develop.

• The music and sound, overall, were of very high quality.
  
  The Bad
  Now to the bad part. In any game, after enough playing (say, a week or two of playing off and on), the merit of the game ultimately comes down to the basic gameplay elements. Does the gameplay intrigue you, and make you want to keep playing? In Diablo II, I found the answer was a definite no.

As even the game's champions say, the game is essentially clicking. With the vast range of skills, nearly all players eventually focus down on, at most, two or three skills that they use repeatedly. So, the combat becomes "Skill 1 Skill 1 Skill 1 Skill 2 Skill 3 Skill 1 Skill 1 Skill 3, etc, etc, etc....." This really did not keep me interested for long.

The other part of the gamplay, the "roleplaying", is where you decide how to best outfit your character. This kept me amused for a while, but eventually becomes tedious. After one gets a character to a fairly high level, there tend to be only one or two particular weapons or pieces of armor that one is looking for.

So, after a while, the game simply becomes, "Go out into this area, kill hundreds of little critters with repeated clicking, and hope you get the item you are looking for". Well, quite frankly, this did not sustain my interest.

The Bottom Line
As everyone says, it's a hack-and-slash game. So whether you like it or not comes down to what other hack-and-slash games you have played. Personally, I enjoyed the first Diablo; but that was before I started playing NetHack.

For those of you who don't know it, nethack is a hack-and-slash game with ASCII graphics. But it has such depth of gameplay that it keeps you interested. Unfortunately, three weeks after I started playing NetHack, I got Diablo II. Now, even though Diablo II was far better than the original Diablo, because I had played NetHack, and knew how good hack-and-slash gameplay could be, Diablo II was deathly boring by comparison.

So, if you played games like Nethack, ADOM, or Angband, don't bother with Diablo or Diablo II. If you haven't played these games, you'll probably enjoy Diablo II - until you see how good games like Nethack are.