"Diablo II: The game with this synopsis"

Diablo II, a game which had been in production for an immensely long time, but boy was it ever worth the wait! It's one of the finest games your PC has to offer you, sending you on an epic journey to battle the minions of hell and save the day. There's an intriguing little story that accompanies the game, it's set some time after the original game (simply titled ''Diablo'') and outlines the reemergence of these evil creatures. It's centered around a ''mysterious'' character who is being very nomadesque and wandering around all over the place, the big problem is that wherever he goes all sorts of insidious monsters seem to jump up! You must take control of your character, beat the heck out of an infinite amount of monsters, unlock the secret of the mysterious characters you encounter and once again thwart the plan of Diablo. It's not going to be short task, and it's not going to be an easy task, but like that's going to stop you now!

GAMEPLAY
The gameplay is incredulously long and has an awful lot of depth as well, it's a game that can suck you in at the start and keep you in until the end when you'll be spat out like a little kid shooting out of a water slide. Even then you migh just decide to climb that long ladder and start this great ride again, no doubt about it, this gameplay is the kind of stuff you'll love and just won't want to ever stop loving. I'm sure some people would like to marry Diablo II and its gameplay if it were legal (just don't go making jokes about the donutesque shape opf the CD now, that would be tasteless of you!).

The first thing a person has to do when they begin a game of Diablo II is choose which character they're going to commandeer, you can choose between the Amazon, Barbarian, Paladin, Necromancer and Sorceress. Each one of these has their own little ups and downs, the Amazon is proficient with the use of projectile weapons and spears, the Barbarian can hold two different weapons and has brutal strength, the Necromancer has the gorgeous ability to bring corpses to life and attack his foes, and on and on the list goes! Depending on which character you choose, you'll have to attack the game in a very different way, as they're all extremely different and not adjusting to their certain skills will mean you're in for a very long and irritating fight, getting slaughtered countless times.

When you start off, you've got very few items, basic weaponry and little money. It can often remain this way for a little while, as you struggle to earn all you need to survive. All one can do is wander outside your little safe haven, kill off a whole lot of monsters and hope that they drop some interesting things for you to hoarde. You can get some fine weapons from beating off some of the more powerful monsters, but nothing can ever be a good substitute for having a very large stash of gold. While playing you have to continually check what you're holding on to, and know exactly what all of your possessions are. You only get an inventory of a certain size, and it can continually fill up if you're not careful. It's always a good idea to keep some space spare in case that incredibly rare, super item magically shows up on the ground in front of you! Back at camp you've got a little chest where you can store some stuff you're not using and all of your money so it doesn't get stolen, should you die, regular trips to that chest are a must!

Diablo II is split into four sections, which they have so conveniently titled ''acts'', in each act you've got quite a few quests which you have to complete to progress further into the game. These quests may involve you taking on an odious task such as basically eliminating a cave full of mosters, destroying an evil spirit or two, or you might even have to fight one of those enormous bosses that the game seems to enjoy throwing at you. Finishing these quests will get you extra rewards which can help you out immensely, they're well varied and can often prove to be very challenging to complete. If you're stuck, you just have to return to camp and the helpful people there will often have some good advice for you or directions for you to follow. They haven't made the mistake of helping you through things too much (like Metal Gear Solid for example) but they give you decent enough information.

It's a big world out there in the land of Diablo II, thankfully you can have map of everywhere you've been brought up at the press of a button. The map is randomly generated, so you may just have to go to a completely different place for all your quests every time you start up a new game, and because of the randomness of the thing you won't be able to see on your handy-dandy map any place you haven't visited before! The map certainly helps you navigate your way around, but it has a nasty habit of cluttering up the screen and it can make it hard to see what your character is actually doing! It would have been nice to see a smaller version of this map localised in one of the corners of the screen (they had four to choose from darn it) for easy reference, but yes, it is too late.

Whenever you smack down an enemy, you get a certain amount of experience points. It is of course these points which will eventually give your level an increase. One thing a person can notice is how long it can take to go up a level a bit later on in the game, it can be very debilitating on a person to reach Level 22 when they hit 850,000 EXP and to see that they need to earn another 200,000 to increase to the next level! This makes levelling up a very lengthy and repetitive process, sometimes you'll swear you've killed every single enemy in the act it can take so long! When you finally do manage to go up a level, you'll get all sorts of wonderful things thrown at you, first up you'll get 5 points to distribute between your strength and vitality and all your other stats, this is the only way to make your character increase in stamina, strength and defense (ignoring the skills added by weapons of course)! You have to make sure you spread them out reasonably even, or you will find major deficiencies in the fighting skills of your character.

The other thing you will get is an oddity known to some as a SKILL POINT, there's a whole lot of skills you can learn which can be demonstrated in battle, by dedicating your skill point to one of them you will either learn or refine that skill. They start off rather simple with things like an attack that hurts your opponent a little bit more, but they get more complicated as your level increases, and eventually you should have a fairly deadly range of moves at your disposal. Those monsters won't stand a chance when you unleash your terrible wrath upon them!

When you die, you will lose all of the armor and weapons which you had equipped at the time of the unfortunate accident and you will be transported back to your camp. To recover your goodies, you will have to traverse the land back to where you passed away, your corpse along with all your stuff will be waiting there for you to collect them. Just make sure you don't die on your way to get them, it creates rather large headaches when you have to pick up two or three sets of weapons and armor.

That was a rather lengthy explanation, wasn't it! The gameplay just has so much depth, you shouldn't ever get sick of it, you've got all those great character classes and their accompanying skills to experiment with. There's a lot of quests to complete (21 in total) and a number of monsters which is off the chart. The violence can get a bit mindless, but it's all in good fun in the end. Some of the most involving and downright awesome gameplay you'll stumble across for quite a while.

GRAPHICS
The visuals are definitely one of the weaker points of Diablo II, being by far overwhelmed by the glory of the gameplay and its assosciated categories. You view your movements via a camera which is set up in a way that can only be described as top-down. You get a nice view of your character and his/her immediate surroundings, but you really can't see enough of what lies ahead of you to ever be happy. There's not really anything special about the graphics, they do an average job and are reasonably detailed when one considers the smaller size that everything is.

The backgrounds aren't anything different, outstanding or entertaining at all. There is a fair amount of variety in the land that you travel across, but it all tends to come across as rather lifeless and boring in the end. One act might feature a barren desert or another might have relatively lush grass and trees and stuff, but you will soon get sick of staring at the same shade of yellow or green for extensive periods of time. Of course there are obstacles and other things which are thrown onto the landscapes all helter skelter which makes the look a little bit more interesting, but these obstacles aren't exactly the most exciting things you'll ever see either. You might run into things such as a wooden cabin or a boulder, and after staring at the same drab colours for a while, these sudden interruptions can appear very excited, of course unless you're a very exciteable person this novelty will soon wear off. There are places which are known as indoors in some circles, and they improve on things a little bit, pillars everywhere, tapestries and all kinds of habedashery hanging off the walls, you get to spend a fair bit of times in areas like this so that's one upside! When discusing detail in the surroundings, the word miniscule might pop up, there is some detail but not an awful lot. You can see things such as bricks, stones or grass making up the ground, and when you reach a place like a swamp filled with mud and surrounded by bushes things just seem to keep getting better and better! The backgrounds don't really push the more powerful computers to their capacity, and they might get a bit boring, but at least they're not overly ugly!

The characters fare a bit better than their surroundings did, they don't take up much of the screen but at least they'll grab your attention more than anything else will! First up there's the characters which you can control, they certainly do their bit to look heroic, wearing all sorts of outrageous attire (which suits their character quite nicely) and having nice sturdy bodies. There is a good amount of detail thrown into these little people, you can distinguish arms from legs and tops from bottoms pretty easily! One nice little feature is how if one changes the helm their character is wearing or perhaps the armor they have on, the ingame character will adjust to accomodate this look as well! The best bit is that these characters aren't even the most extravegant that Diablo II has to offer! All of those enemies that you have to hack up show the imagination and design skills that this game and its makers have, of course there are smaller, simpler enemies which aren't anything special, but when one moves onto the largher bosses you could almost be blown away! These bosses look terribly intimidating, taking up large portions of the screen and having some rather hideous features. They have a large amount of detail, and are some of the prettier bosses I've come across in my time. The animations done by the characters are a bit mixed, some of them can be quite convincing, but the movements such as the running done by the lead characters can look rather silly. Because everything is at the size that it is, the animations are tougher to notice, so they shouldn't be scrutinised too harshly. Overall the characters are decent, and improve upon the backgrounds in terms of quality, but of course they're still not the nicest things you're likely to see this week.

There's a few videos that pop in at intervals in the gameplay, and these look absolutely magnificent. They are some of the most brilliant scenes that you will see this week, and are definitely worth repeat viewings. They're rather long sequences, and the standards don't even drop a little bit throughout the entire things. Being a game that has a focus on battle and magic there was always going to be a lot of special effects, and they look pretty darn good. Green mist for poison, sparks of electricity flying all over the place, things suddenly bursting into flames....there's a lot of lighting effects and such and they're very nice indeed. Sometimes there can be an enormous amount of traffic on-screen at the same time, there's a lot of enemies out there, and because of this you can get hit by a bit of slowdown! There aren't too many techincal problems with the graphics, but that is one of the worst of them.

Overall, the graphics look okay but don't excel in any particular area (except those luscious videos of course!). At no point during the game will you think to yourself, ''Oh lawks a lawdy those graphics look pretty!'', they're just not that special. These are visuals that can hold their own, but only barely, it'd be best just to forget the graphics and concentrate more on some of the nicer areas when trying to enjoy the game as best you can.

SOUND
The sound is a little better than the graphics, but not by much, it just doesn't appear to be a game that will knock peoples socks off with the quality of its outer appearance. It's an awfully long game if you didn't know, and it'd be tough for a person to enjoy all that the audio has to offer for its entire lifespan. There are some very nice features, but also some that just negate the better areas by being decidedly ordinary, and it can often be tough to enjoy one when another is so sub-par. This makes the sound very confusing, sometimes it may appear as if you like it, but then it might just go and annoy the heck out of you a few minutes later! It can be tough deciding whether you like it or not, just listen to it for 100 hours or so and THEN decide!

The background music is always a nice place to start, the best word to describe the music which is meant to be accompanying you non-stop on your journey is INVISIBLE. It seems to me like it's just on your computer to waste precious MB, you're hardly ever able to hear it, and when you do it turns out to be a pretty big anti-climax. After turning up my speakers ALL the way, it became clear to me that it's the type of music which could theoretically create tension OR put the player in a rather dark and adventurous mood. It jus sits there in the background brooding, or doing whatever it darn well pleases, it consists of rather deep notes along with a few melodic bars which may jump in now and again to spice things up. It's a rather repetitive style of music, you can imagine yourself hearing the same sections every ten or twenty seconds, and taking the length of game into consideration this is a ridiculous figure. The background themes are definitely not impressing anybody with their antics, they're best just left alone as provoking them can cause a lot of trouble!

The sounds do an enormous amount to repair the damage caused by that inconsiderate background music, the effects are extremely commonplace and are of a good quality. As you make your way around you're going to do a lot of battling, and this is where the effects are at their peak, the sounds of metal or wood hitting flesh and bone, and the shrill screams or war cries of the enemies all make for an entertaining time. The file which holds all the sounds is extremely large, and after playing the game you can see why, pretty much every concievable action will have an accompanying sound, and they all sound so good! There also happens to be a lot of speech delivered in Diablo II both from the main characters and the assitant cast who all play a part in progressing towards your goal. Everything, from the accents to the language appears to fit the time-frame that the game is set in, the delivery isn't too shabby either. Some of the voices and their sayings rate a bit high on the corniness factor, but most of the stuff is good stuff! The sound effects are great, they are pretty much all you're going to hear from the audio department and thankfully they're good enough to make this allowable.

Overall, the sound is an incredibly mixed up bag. You've got the background music on one side, upsetting and disappointing people all over the world, and all the way over the other side is the sound effects, fighting evil and being an all-round good guy! In the end the quality and quantity of the sound effects manage to outweigh the lack of both from the background music, making the overall score of the sound of Diablo II a pretty good one.

LIFESPAN
Judging by the length of the gameplay section, you're going to spend a lot of time just getting to know the game, let alone actually playing it. It is a long game, each act taking a long time to get through, those quests aren't exactly the shortest things! Of course you'll also spend hours at a time just levelling up, it all adds up to a lifespan of unprecedented length. You may find the game to be repetitive and annoying during some of the earlier stages, but the longer the game goes for the more you'll seem to like it. Diablo II is definitely a game that can last you a large number of months, maybe even travelling into years if you really get into the swing of things. You won't be satisfied with only winning with just one character!

FUN
The fun factor of Diablo II is probably only mid-range, as there are some features of the game which can just annoy the absolute heck out of you. The perilous journey to retrieve the gear from your dead body, the many hours spent mindlessly meandering around the landscapes whacking creatures on the head with a big wooden clun, things like this make the game less fun that it should be. I'll admit it, when you're actually progressing through the game at a steady pace and taking those quests on, the game is just as fun as any game out there, the big problems are those areas inbetween the progressions in which you're just bored off your head. Also, when you manage to beat that nasty boss which might have just knocked you off twenty consecutive times, you'll get a truckload of satisfaction and enjoyment from seeing him disappear, but the fun factor STILL could have afforded to be a bit higher!

CHALLENGE
The challenge would be somewhere between medium-high and high, if you're a bit of an expert at games like this (which I am definitely not) you might have a bit of an easier time, but it's by no means a pushover of a game. Tactics are important in deciding the difficulty of the game, it's better to fight head on, and eliminate enemies rather than do a runner and end up with fifty or more of the critters on your tail. As long as you keep your stats nice and high, get a powerful weapon, and play smartly you will eventually work your way through the game. Those inexperienced in the ways of videogaming or those who haven't played a game like this before may just struggle, it's a tough game to just dive into and expect to come out of alive.

OVERALL
Diablo II is definitely one of the best games a computer owner can get, it's a game that requires a lot of patience and nurturing to get to the end, but by gumis it worth it! Of course the design elements are a bit lacking, but that is made up for in nearly every other single category. This is a game that can totally absorb your attention and take over your life should you allow it, you can't help but get a shiver up your spine as you put the CD in and watch this wondrous game load. If you love (or maybe just like) games, have a bit of spare time and spare money or just like the idea of beating up poor defenceless monsters, perhaps Diablo II should be your next stop. Try it, and there's no way you can be disappointed.
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GOOD POINTS
- Some of the best darn gameplay you'll ever darn well darning experience!
- A lifespan that will rival that of any other game out there!
- It's an excellent game for those people looking for a good/tough challenge

BAD POINTS
- Boring, lifeless, drab graphics
- The background music is just ridiculously bad
- Do you really want to spend hours at a time just to gain a single level?
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GRAPHICS - 6/10
SOUND - 7/10
GAMEPLAY - 10/10
LIFESPAN - 10/10
FUN - 8/10
CHALLENGE - 10/10
OVERALL - 10/10