"The Final Conclusion"

Diablo 2 certainly had a lot of hype surrounding it up to its release, nearly like that of FF8 for the playstation. The question here is did it live up to the hype?

Well, arguably, yes and no. The reason that there were a few fundamental flaws within the game. Upon its release, there were a lot of bugs that needed to be fixed thus introducing the patches 1.01 up to 1.03 within a very short space of time. However, despite these patches being released the exceptional weapons, such as the lance, and the bug concerning the bows and arrows were not fixed and have still yet to wait for the 1.04 to hopefully fix this problem.

From this point of view it could be argued that the problems that gamers experienced, such as crashes from time to time due to the music mpq files or the like may disappoint the original Diablo fans who had minimal problems installing and playing the prequel. Anyways, on with the review of the game.

GRAPHICS

Nothing special at all, much like the previous with a little bit of an improvement. Since I don't have a 3D card I honestly can not tell you how it looks with one and therefore am not qualified to make a more detailed analysis of how the graphics would fare although I have heard that it wasn't that much better from several friends.

5/10

SOUND

The track suits the atmosphere of the game throughout, although it does not particularly distinguish itself as being utterly unforgettable. By unforgettable I mean something like a theme tune for a particular character class or town. The sound effects were the usual one liners that one gets after having completed a quest or the occasional grunt when being hit by an enemy. All in all the sounds in the game were decent albeit typical of such a game.

6/10

GAMEPLAY

Perhaps the most important part of the game, and the one that distinguishes this game so much more than the previous one. Besides gaining experience and stats points with which you can choose which abilities you want to increase accordingly - Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Energy, you also have the new concept of Skill Points. These only appear after you have gained a level and unlike stats points only comes up with 1 point instead of 5 like the stat points. The difference here is that every character class has different skills, and to specialise in a few of them would be very advantageous in battles to come for example the harder boss battles. It is therefore critical that Skill points are used wisely and tactically. Sometimes it may even be better to save these skill points until your level is high enough to unlock the better skills and use them to maximise their utility. The fact that each character has got a lot of different skills means that you can have a diverse amount of different evolution paths that your character can take. Moreover, the need to use skill points wisely lies in the fact that you cannot afford to maximise every single skill for that character as it would require more than 100 levels, and your max level only goes up to 100 anyway. This new concept makes each character new and interesting as you personally create your own character how you want it to be. It is this particular concept that is fascinating at the option you can have at your fingertips. The gameplay content here therefore scores a perfect 9.

The learning curve is easy to grasp as it is basically a point and click format which is very much like to the prequel. However, the appearance of harder difficulties such as Nightmare and Hell mode make the game more interesting as it becomes much harder to fight bosses or unique monsters. Moreover the appearance of 'exceptional' armour also adds to the diversity of rare and unique items that you can get whereas in the prequel there were a limited amount of unique items. This leads to the next section...the fun factor.

FUN FACTOR

The fact that there are so many different unique and rare items make this game even more fun and the fact that there are superior weapons greatly affect the number of good items available throughout the game. The harder difficulties also provide good fun with much harder bosses and monsters. The fun factor in this game is very good indeed and would score another perfect 9.

To conclude therefore, this game is worth getting, although one may be disappointed at the amount of bugs, or the graphics. However, the diversity of the game is vastly improved and seems to add more fun to the game. I would advise people to buy this game as it is good for both single player and multi player as well.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/21/00, Updated 11/21/00