Diablo 4 review | VG247

Blood! Swag! Numbers! cows! devil is a series with a storied legacy, built on solid pillars that have sustained the classic ARPG for years. It’s a name that still carries well-deserved clout, even if Diablo Immortal (and, to a lesser degree, Diablo 3) soured that reputation in the minds of fans. With Diablo 4 almost here, Activision Blizzard has a chance to take their minds off stolen breast milk, canceled PvE modes, union-busting, and tough takeovers with an old-fashioned bloody brawl.

Diablo 4 is a game that, from the start, was clearly meant to evoke the Diablo 2 era: dark and terrible, unafraid to throw in the grim reality of a demonic invasion, and willing to splatter strong religious overtones across its face. Diablo 3, while hey, always felt more like a fantasy epic. Diablo 4 manages a return to creepy Hadean form, but, perhaps appropriately, it’s betrayed. Betrayed by perplexing design decisions, betrayed by bugs, betrayed by issues that range from simply aggravating to utterly devastating.

With that in mind, let’s start with what Diablo 4 does well. I won’t spoil the narrative, but if you’ve played any of the beta versions, you’ll know that both the world of Sanctuary and the characters within it are full of personality. Diablo 4 is a metal album, for sure; Packed with climactic moments and grand battles against terrifying enemies and dire odds. But it is also sad. Curse sad. Tragedy flows through Sanctuary as you would expect in a world where the threat of demonic incursions is a reality to be faced. There is no place in the world that seems like a decent place to live. Every inch of Diablo 4 is Port Talbot, Wales.

This is not a game you want to play alongside a podcast (at least not the first time). The Diablo 4 OST is outstanding; equal parts haunting and daunting, just like his traumatized world. Traversing the broken field, I found that my ears often perked up when I wasn’t knee-deep in a fight. The boss themes are especially good: the final boss clue stands out as a perfect crescendo to the game’s epic conclusion.

Two decades later, Activision Blizzard’s filmmaking staff remains one of the best in the business. Watch the embedded trailer above as a reminder: when we’re treated to these tantalizing glimpses of Diablo 4, the world around your monitor disappears. These fully realized pieces of Diablo are a testament to Blizzard and a high tide mark of the quality the studio is still capable of producing.

The direction and voice acting is equally prestigious. Ralph Ineson bounces effortlessly between wise wisdom, bardic charisma, and utter dismay as Lorath in a performance that just might fill the void that Michael Gough as Deckard Cain left in our hearts. Donan, a character you don’t want me to discuss in detail here, is masterfully portrayed as well.

A somber undertone seeps out of Diablo 4 like runoff from a freshly baked molten chocolate cake. You get that sweet taste right from the start that makes your mouth water – a beautiful collaboration between talented environment designers, animators, composers and voice actors. It is the sickly sweet that makes up for the dark bitterness of the world and surroundings. And it’s impossibly more delicious.

Suffice it to say, then, that Diablo 4 is an audiovisual feast of gory delights. But how is it played? Well, there, it’s more like a rare steak. As a barbarian, you can dash through blood-soaked swamps and strike down one of countless hideous monsters with your axe. As you’d expect, the resulting splash is enticing, sticky, and alluring. The team responsible for making the player feel like a battleship in their respective class has done wonders: whether you’re slashing, throwing, or conjuring, Diablo 4 makes you feel unstoppable.

Diablo 4 has five distinct classes, each with unique skill trees, class-specific traits, and the expected arsenal of exotic weapons and armor, each with different modifiers. Like its peers in the genre and series, Diablo 4 is a game that rewards those who are willing to experiment, all in order to push content to increase (and eventually amazing) difficulty.

But this trip to hell is not without its flaws. For those who don’t know, Diablo 4 ditch the somewhat linear format of other games in the genre in favor of a large, open map. There are still acts, but now they refer to a main story quest which, roughly speaking, walks you through each of the main regions. After beating the game and playing through the final content, Diablo 4 loses some valuable momentum and settles into a predictable, grind-focused pace, much sooner than you might expect.

You enter Scolsglen for the first time during Act 2 and arrive in the main hub city of the area. You will come across several side quests there; Quick and attractive secondary objectives that go along the main path and break the monotony. Here, however, due to the open world MMO nature of the game, you are given objectives such as “kill 10 boars” or “kill specific enemies until they randomly drop a quest item”. If this sounds a bit like World of Warcraft, well, that’s because it is. If you’re the kind of player who likes to wrap up every area the moment you arrive, you might find yourself walking into Duskwood, circa 2004.

I suspect this is the case because it needs to be: these secondary objectives should have you going out and farming mobs that respawn quickly because the game has to assume you and 35 other hellish recruits are doing it at the same time. If you were heading to kill a specific and exciting elite enemy, I imagine this wouldn’t be an issue. Stick with the dungeons! They’re much better ways to pass the time between story missions. I would trade 50% of all these quests for a cow level.

If you just want good old-fashioned Diablo narrative to sink your neck in… too bad! I played the campaign at world tier 2 the first time, which gives you a bonus to gain experience. Even with that, you’ll find yourself under-leveled as you head into the main act quests. It’s better to get away and fly through some strongholds or dungeons when you can, rather than having to stop right at the entrance to the endgame area.

This is where you start to feel like the molten chocolate cake from before seems a little too full, a little repetitive after too many bites. You want to go back to that steak, but Blizzard has moved on, now. You’re stuck with this course, for better or worse/

But there are positive things in this. The open world bosses and events are a lot of fun. Anyone who has participated in the beta or started an MMO in the last 10 years can tell you. It’s great to see other players wandering around, and while I didn’t actually get a chance to kill anyone in the open-world PvP zones (not for a lack of trying, I did spend a few seconds chasing down a rogue collecting altars of Lilith), these are avenues for the game that I’m sure a lot of people will like.

The largely bogged down secondary content means that the act of leveling up new characters in future runs, where most of the long-term enjoyment of ARPGs comes from, is heavily dependent on the quality of the game’s seasonal updates. . We still don’t know what they are, and as such, I can’t say whether or not returning to Diablo 4 is an enticing adventure. If Diablo 4 seasons only offer slight variations in overall gameplay, then I won’t spend too much time on replays. And I can have an intense career, because I am a masochist.

No matter what food you’re eating, you don’t want to find bugs on it. Some performance issues and crashes were reported to reviewers ahead of time, but I ran into a number of glitches that really slapped the joy out of the entire Diablo 4 experience. The worst, by far, came with an Act 3 boss, which was causing my game to crash repeatedly. I brute-forced this boss through around seven crashes, running back into the dungeon from a nearby waypoint each time. To say that he took the wind out of my sails is an understatement; he was about to rip the mast off the hull.

While my experience was largely smooth with a co-op run of the final boss, my colleague Sherif experienced intense lag, got stuck in the final scene with no audio, and was able to see my run hitting enemies in close-up. . By the time he was able to play, the boss was invisible and he had already made good progress in the fight. Not the most climactic way to wrap up the story, right?

I am also concerned about the presence of a battle pass and the in-game store. We haven’t been able to see it either, although a screenshot of part of the store has been provided to reviewers for the sake of clarity. Obviously these things, when done right, are largely non-issue, and love it or hate it, a reality of gaming these days. However, looking at the monetization history on Activision Blizzard titles lately worries me.

Overwatch 2’s expensive battle pass rewards and the WoW token being added to Classic WoW are just two recent examples of this. I recommend that those wary sit back and wait to see how the company approaches this aspect of the game. If it’s just cool horse skins, so be it, but fans of Blizzard titles should have learned some skepticism by now.

Diablo 4 is good, but it could have been more. It’s a very good entry for the series as a whole, and will give the vast majority of its players a great time. Bugs and live service concerns aside, it’s a nice package (even for players more drawn to the old ways of doing things). The development team has gone to great lengths to bring the best parts of Diablo out of hell, emboldened and enriched. But you never come back from the dead without one or two grim trophies to remind you of your time at the bottom, right?

advantages

• Same great Diablo action, bloodier than ever
• A great story, equal parts depressing and staggeringly great.

Cons

• Open world structure dilutes the goodness a bit
• Some serious bugs that could affect your time with the game at launch

Tested version: PS5. The publisher provided copies of the game..