Diablo 2 was a masterpiece when it came out over 20 years ago, and I’ve spent countless of hours with the original. I wasn’t too keen on playing the remaster, but Diablo Immortal made me want to play a Diablo game on my TV, and I was not going back to Diablo 3.
So you do a remake of one of the best games of a generation, and in the process you update its graphics. Why don’t you, in that process update the rest of the game as well to todays standard? Why not add those conveniences that we come to expect from modern games? and just remove mechanics that were broken or just a bad idea in the original?
Here are some things I don’t like about this game
- When you die you loose all your equipment and need to run to your corpse to retrieve it. However the enemy that killed you is standing on your corpse and since you’re butt naked, the likelyhood for you to die again is very high. This is not good game design.
- Durability on weapons is a useless mechanic. Even FROM SOFTWARE have recognised this and removed durability in their latest games. What is the point of keeping this in?
- Stamina is also a useless mechanic in this game. It is not bound to fighting, but only controls your ability to run. Sure it will make a difference during your corpse run, but otherwise no.
- This is a game where you will be spamming heal and going through healing items like candy. There is something inherently wrong here in the balance of the game.
- Some of the randomly generated enemies in the game is ridiculously powerful. They will kill you by just looking at you. I don’t see the fun in dying in 2 seconds without the opportunity to actually do something. This also seems to be a balancing problem.
- The bosses are something else. The best strategy is recast a town portal in the boss room and jump in and out. This is the only way to defeat some bosses like Duriel who kills even an over levelled character in a few hits.
- Inventory management in this game is horrible and boring. The number of times I’ve heard my character say “I’m over burdened”. Moving things around between your character and stash is not a fun minigame.
Concerning the conversion to consoles I hate it when they introduce the concept of a “pointer” as a replacement for the PC mouse. It is really bad design, and I’m not sure why they did it when they found an okay system without it in Diablo 3.
Apart from all that, the game is still surprisingly fun to play. The loot is a reward in itself and I don’t think I’ve played Lord of Destruction DLC many times, because I couldn’t remember most of it.
I rate this game as GOOD.
Replay 