REVIEW: Enjoy a Violent and Hellish Fantasy in DIABLO IV
NOTE: This game was reviewed on the PS5.
When dealing with a game as expansive as Diablo IV, it can be difficult to fully review it without having weeks and weeks of play time and hundreds of hours of game time (which I don’t have the time for). However, is clear to see that Diablo IV is an extremely strong case of knowing how to make a game incredible and just about every way. While I personally haven’t dived deep into the endgame or gotten to level 100 on multiple characters, it’s easy to see that the journey to get to the endgame is filled with loads of fun, customization, challenge, and hundreds of hours of prime entertainment.
This entire review could be summed up in just a sentence or two. If you enjoy great action, dark themes, and deep customization, then play this game. Period. Diablo IV feels like a hybrid of Diablo II and Diablo III in the best ways possible. As for the rest of the review, there are three significant aspects to address in a game like this: gameplay loop, character, building, and story.
The gameplay Diablo IV is absolutely the best part of the game. I legitimately have a hard time not chasing down every single enemy that comes on the screen trying to take them down. I have no idea why I have such an incentive to hunt down every single skeleton or giant bat, but any enemy I see, each horde that attacks me, and each unexplored location fills me with intrigue and desire to keep on going. Trudging through tough dungeons, engaging sidequests, and visceral fights surprisingly never gets old. I do wish there was a way to lighten the clutter that happens after many, many enemies appear on the screen or four players are activating all their abilities at once, but it’s a small and not terribly problematic issue.
Almost as good as the gameplay itself, building a character and creating builds between abilities, armor, and the ridiculously deep paragon system is a fantastical playground to creating your favorite killing machine you’ve always dreamed of. It can be relatively straightforward how to do everything when it comes to making the builds you want, but I feel like Diablo IV is stuck in a very classical sense of building a character. Modern gaming allows for and encourages lots of customization and experimentation, especially as endgame activities approach. However, Diablo IV more or less punishes you for trying to use new equipment, use new builds, and try new approaches to gameplay. It isn’t awful or impossible to experiment, it’s just time-consuming. For example, if a player wanted to change from a fire-based build instead of a lightning-based build, the player would have to either remove abilities and upgrades one by one to add new abilities or reset their entire ability tree with a cost (which can be quite sizable when players get into the higher echelon of levels). It just feels so odd when other games encourage you to experiment with your character and Diablo IV actively hinders you from experimenting often.
The last thing to really discuss is the actual story of Diablo IV. While it is a strong and interesting story, I couldn’t help but be detached from the actual story. It is far too easy for players to completely ignore the story and run around attacking things for hours and hours with no reason why. That can be a good option to have for sure. However, my character seemed more like a bystander and byproduct of events happening in the world instead of my character actively changing the world. Players can engage and enjoy cool cutscenes and interesting sidequests that are fairly visceral, but I found the player’s character trying too often to catch up on the plot instead of being the plot.
A small thing to note, there’s been a lot of conversation about how the seasons work in Diablo IV. Having to make new characters for upcoming seasons and other things like that have been a hot topic. While that new gameplay model can be frustrating and relatively unique, it in no way ruins the core experience of Diablo IV. There are still a crazy amount of hours to be lost in this game even if you just enjoy the baseline game and don’t engage with the seasons that start later this summer.
Diablo IV is honestly exactly what I expected. There are definitely some minor issues and places that I wish were more streamlined or better adjusted for the modern gaming mentality. But overall, the game is incredible and an easy recommendation for anybody who enjoys action games or role-playing games. This game is also good enough and built well enough to help new players, I would happily recommend this to anybody who has never tried an RPG or action-oriented game, they just might want a friend or a few YouTube videos to give them some tips here and there.
