"Click, click, click, click. Is this supposed to be fun??"

When I think of what makes a good RPG, I tend to think of Plot first, followed by fun gameplay, great sound, and decent graphics. Diablo manages to fail at each of these, in its own spectacularly bad way.

Diablo is a game that purports to be nothing more than dungeon hacking. It has the ability to create new dungeons forever, so that you never have to fight through the same dungeon twice. However, I don't see why you'd go through this crappy game once. Once the dungeon is created you take your pick of a warrior, mage, or rogue, and start into it. You begin in a town that seems to exist only as a starting point for your adventures. The town only has the basic services (one of each, a blacksmith, healer, magic shope, etc.), so it really is just a refueling point for when you come back out of the dungeon. Your character quickly finds that there is a cave here, filled with monsters, and goes into it.

And I suppose that the plot could be summed up thusly: Start in town, go into dungeon, fight, kill bad guy, ''win''. Oh goodie. There's nothing quite so hollow than a game like this, where it ignores the important parts of gamemaking (such as making a good plot, or making it fun) and settles for trying to make a non-stop action fighting game. What's the point of all this fighting, anyway? So that you can make it to an arbitrary boss? What are you fighting for? To save a town that exists only to serve you anyway?

I suppose that this game would work, if the fighting system wasn't so crude, and annoying. To fight something, you click on it. To fight some more, you click some more. Click, click, click, clikkity clikkity click. After playing this game only an hour I was already sick of battles, and my clicking finger was getting stiff. I really expected a Baldur's Gate type of battle system, in which you clicked once on an enemy, and your character would attack until one of you was dead. Not so, in Diablo, you have to click for every single attack. If not, your character will stand there gleefully getting killed. And there isn't any strategy to the fights, either, you just enter a new room, kill everything you can, then move on to the next room. I never had to think about the upcoming combat, I just had to run in and start clicking until everything was dead. Diablo brought tedium to a new level of banalness.

Not to complain about its graphics, but these graphics were dated 3 years before this game came out. Your character is unaccountably small, and hazy, monsters are small and illdefined, and each dungeon is dark and looks about like all the other dungeons. But then again, I'd have no real problems with the graphics, if the game was fun, which it isn't.

This is the first game I've reviewed in which I can't remember a single piece of music (a thing that normally sticks out in my mind!), or any bit of sound effects. What does this mean? I guess just that the music was mediocre, neither good nor bad.

In short, a lot of people liked this game, though I can't find a reason why. This game is pointless, and irritatingly poorly made. It has no plot, pointless combat, and bad graphics. All in all, a bad game!

I gave Diablo a 3 because I didn't enjoy playing it, and found it to be an empty (hollow, if you will) experience, that made me appreciate the many better games out there.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/08/00, Updated 04/08/00