My boys have a game called cookie clicker. It’s a game where you click and you get cookies. After getting enough cookies you can deploy grandmas who generate cookies without the need of clicking. My youngest son has 1 billion cookies.
This is a lot what Diablo 4 feels like to me. I click and click and get rewards for my clicking. There is not much skill involved. I just have to walk around the world and click. That is the whole game. And the loot.
There has been a hyper inflation in Sanctuary. I remember in Diablo 2 you were very happy if you got a rare item, and you held on to that item for a long time. In this game I need to town scroll back to town at regular intervals because my backpack is full of rare items. It’s just crap and legendary items are the ones worth saving.
The whole game is really dumbed down. You don’t assign attribute points (str, dex, hp) when you level anymore, they are assigned for you. You don’t need to manage town scrolls, you have an infinite supply. There are elite monsters in droves it doesn’t really matter because they can’t kill you. Remember in Diablo 2 when you met a monster with lightning? Yeah, you would run away.
The skill tree looks interesting at first, but you get so many skill points that you soon have points in all the skills that look remotely interesting and you won’t know what skills to put points in anymore. There is no real build when you can just put points in everything.
I played the main story. It was okay but I didn’t like the reuse of enemies and places from previous games. Why not do something new? Create new memorable characters, instead of leaning so much on the previous games.
At first I played a lot of side missions. They were great for leveling up my character but it doesn’t give you much benefits since the monsters level up with you. The side missions aren’t that interesting either. They don’t tie into the story and they don’t progress the world building.
They follow a common pattern of fetch quests or kill X number of monsters, and soon become tedious. The randomized dungeons also loose their charm after you figure out their patterns. It becomes a trudge of grinding hordes of demons while you try to get through as fast as possible.
I don’t kill everything. I don’t open every basket. I don’t pick up all the gold. There is no point. It doesn’t matter. I have 500 000 gold why would waste 2 seconds to pick up another 100g? The chance of a legendary item dropping from a basket makes it just a waste of time looting them.
So what does this game do well? It is a really good cookie clicker. It has a lovely atmosphere and it keeps on dangling that nice loot in front of you, keeping you engaged and want to click more. Some would say that the real game starts after the main story, but if you don’t like the game play, think that the side missions are shallow and uninteresting, what reason is there really for me to keep on playing.
I rate this game as OKAY.
Replay 