Gaming World Tour: Diablo
So I’m sure at this point we all know what Diablo is, right? There’s a reason why the term “Diablo Clone” exists, and it’s because, well, Diablo was a ludicrously effective trailblazer and a pretty good game to boot. But I’m not here to blow smoke. I’m not the type of person who’s going to back off from criticizing a game just because it’s popular.
See, in my butcher’s room, every game is on the same slab. Games like Diablo don’t get the prime golden cutting boards just because of their notoriety – nor am I that guy who’s going to go out there and say “this is popular so it’s bad”. I go into every game with a totally fresh perspective, you feel me?
Yeah, I think I’ve made my point. That should stop people from-
“HEY FEN, YOU’RE JUST GIVING RIDE TO HELL: RETRIBUTION A BAD REVIEW BECAUSE EVERYONE HATES IT”
ah sh*t
So, uh, where were we? Oh yeah, Diablo. Should probably talk about that. Well, I’ve played about as much Diablo as you legally can within the last week, so I’ll give you a quick rundown.
First off, getting it to run wasn’t a horrible hassle, so that’s nice.
As for the game itself, in case you aren’t familiar with Diablo (like I wasn’t before this review) here’s the experience summed up in one sentence. “Warrior Sucks”
What, that doesn’t explain it for you? Fine, fine. You pick between 3 classes. The Rogue, The Sorcerer and the Garbageman, and you go galivanting through a spooky church dungeon killing skeletons and opening empty chests. And, for the most part, it’s pretty solid!
Perhaps the greatest strength is the atmosphere, which genuinely makes you feel like you’re about to die a miserable death at all times. It’s just incredibly unsettling, and kudos to that, really. Aside from that, the gameplay is pleasantly smooth and fairly satisfying, with the exception of the Warrior (melee combat isn’t very fun to begin with and especially gets tedious in big groups) and especially with the rogue, who’s just a blast to play.
Really, the only problems I have with Diablo are either minor complaints, things that can’t be helped in a game from decades ago or things that personally bother me, like artificial difficulty hordes of a billion enemies! Yeah, whether it’s a bullet sponge or just 800 burning skeletons (or, the worst case of them all, 800 bullet sponges…hi borderlands 2), the case remains: having an enemy that you have to chip at for 7 hours or copy+pasting enemies doesn’t make the game harder, it just makes it more tedious and annoying and wastes your time.
Meanwhile, when you’re not being mobbed by lightning demons or whatever, you get to hang around town! Sadly, town just kind of sucks. It’s not a fun place to be and there’s not really much you can do to entertain yourself.
It’s also a little annoying that everyone has such fleshed out characters and relationships with each other that are never actually expanded on in-game. There’s almost definitely a bunch of lore about it, but these shady people interest me. I want to know more about these clowns, but the best NPC interaction you’re gonna get is talking to the drunk about black mushrooms or getting chewed out by Wirt if you ask him stupid questions he couldn’t possibly know the answer to.
It easily could have been fleshed out more in the base game, s’all I’m saying.
Also, I kept getting saddled with the “boo hoo our water doesn’t taste good” quest instead of getting to go kill the Skeleton King, which I only got to do, like, twice total I think. And those were both warrior runs, so that number might as well be zero.
But hey, every game has minor little annoyances like these, and it adds to the charm of playing a video game if anything. Should tell you that one of my few major gripes was that demons kept pissing in the goddamn water supply.
Bastards.
Anyway, I recommend giving D1 a play (which you can legally do for free now that it’s abandonware BTW, unless you’re playing warrior in which case they’ll just arrest you on the spot).
Oh yeah, by the way, if you see Murphy’s Shrine, don’t click on it. It sucks. Trust me, Murphy is just a sad, angry man who brings nothing but pain.
