"Is the add-on pack any good."

Ever heard of the game Diablo. Thought so. It was an epic classic released in 1996 after months (and possibly years of waiting). I wouldnt say it stirred up the games industry a great deal but it was an awsome game. You took control of either a mystic sorceror, a mysterious rouge or a muscular warrior. You had to travel down to the bowels of the earth and kill a great demon called Diablo. Well since it was a huge success some person out there thought they could make a ton of money. No it wasnt someone from the original team, Blizzard but it was from a third party company named Sierra. They took up the project of creading a add-on pack for the original Diablo to feed the monster hungry souls of Diablo fans while Blizzard worked on the sequel which i aint played unfortunatley. And so it came to pass that Sierra released this add-on pack. I got my hands round it just a few weeks ago after purchasing the original Diablo...This is what i found.

Plot
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The best way i can describe the plot of Hellfire is basically Diablo with new features and parts. It would probably have been better to release Diablo as a 2 cd game with Hellfire being an intergral part of the game because thats the most annoying thing about Hellfire. I would assume that 90% of people buying hellfire will be buying it after having bought, completed and got bored of the original. For the remaining 10% its a good investment to get Hellfire as its just Diablo beefed up a bit making it a better game. The problem lies with the fact that people who have completed the original will be repeating it almost over again. The only huge differences between Hellfire and Diablo are the occasional new item or spell and 2 new sets of levesl (the Crypt and the Hive) apart from that everything looks like it did in Diablo. I know its not a stand alone game but they could have at least created new monsters for the existing parts in Diablo like Hell or the Caves.

Graphics
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Like ive already mentioned its basically Diablo with new features. So the graphics for the parts that were already in Diablo are exactly the same. However in the 2 new areas that Sierra created especially for Hellfire they went all out in the graphics department. For example; when you go to the hive level there are many new monsters that look a lot cooler than the original monsters. The spider lords in the hive and the Lichs in the Crypt have a eery sense of realism about them that makes the game just that little bit more involving.

Sound and Music
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The sound in Hellfire and Diablo are both some of the best soundtracks in games. The music itself isnt ground breaking but the sound effects are brilliant. The sound of arrows burrying into the hides of small creatues or the swipe of swords on skeletons bones is beautifully created. The whoosh you get when you cast some of the spells just makes you so mutch more involved. Although you might not think about it sound can be a very involving. Next time you play your fave game turn off the sound and youll notice how much worse it is. The best sounds are when you kill the Succbi (funny half naked witches) and you hear a horrible gasp of them drawing in their last breath.

Gameplay
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Gameplay was never Diablos strong point. All your basically doing is click click clicking on monsters and door but for some reason its strangly compelling. Maybe its being driven to getting enough magic points to learn that new spell or maybe its trying to kill that unique boss or maybe its even to complete the quests. Yes you heard me right, i said quests. One of the neatest things that gives Diablo/Hellfire a large amount of replay value is the various quests that you can do. There are about 14 of them in the game and you get about 7 of them each game. They include; fixing a towns broken water supply, killing a nasty monster, rescuing a teddy bear for a little girl and many many more. they add a new element of gameplay to Hellfire. Thankfully Sierra decided to include a couple of new quest in there, 2 are only unlockable by entering a special code in a .txt file in the hellfire directory but if you want to know more of that i am sure you should be able to find it on some decent Hellfire page. Now ill move on to one of the annyoing things of Hellfire. The one thing that puts its score down to 6. Whereas in Diablo there was no real difficulty involved, it was just a straight forward game from start to finish with not to many hickups (one of the reasons it was so enjoyable) in Hellfire at times the difficulty can be insobmountable. For example in the crypt levels even as a level 24 warrior some of the areas were near impossible. I had fireballs and magical projectiles flung at me from every direction and it game me a damn big headache trying time and time again to kill the demons. In the end i was forced to cheat :).

Overall
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Hellfire has its good points. It has new areans and new puzzles and new quests and if your pc just cant handle Diablo 2 of if you just want more of the original then its a good investment. However, because of the incredibly large difficulty and the fact that here in the U.K. its more expensive than the actualy original game its not worth playing unless you can borrow it off a friend (like i did)

6/10

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/12/00, Updated 11/12/00