"click click click click click click"

Diablo II is probably my favorite game of all time.

The first Diablo game from Blizzard was a nifty and dark dungeon crawler, one of the better and more memorable PC games of the 90s. A lot of people I knew played the hell out of it - start off with one character, play through the game, then try the other characters, then play online, then read about all the little secrets and tricks and so on. We left the original game with hundreds of hours played, and while I wouldn't say we were burned out on the game, we definitely exhausted pretty much all content it offered. It's a tribute to the depth of the game design that it took so long to be so utterly finished with it, really.

Diablo II was a much anticipated sequel. Could Blizzard take the Diablo design and make it as good? Could they keep my interest for hundreds of hours again? I avoided getting swept up in all the hype surrounding the game until weeks before release, so any details wouldn't be spoiled, and any delays wouldn't bug me. I learned my lesson from Mechwarrior 2 that being overly excited and keeping up to date with a game before it's just about to be released is the path of masochism.

In late June, 2000, I picked up Diablo II like many others, and installed it. Hey, cool packaging with evil artwork and awesome looking screen shots. The game's intro movie was awesome, and soon after I was at the character select screen. Five classes to choose from, each with unique design and obvious function, though the Necromancer didn't seem nearly as obvious as the others. And so that was the class I chose, because I had to see how the class played out. I also loved the effects he showed off as you selected him. Off I went, talking with everyone in the rogue encampment and then running out into the Blood Moor...

As I said, there are five distinct classes in Diablo II. Each one represents a fairly unique play style and all of them look good. Great work here. Each person even has a very limited amount of speech, confined to a sentence for certain areas and boss kills. Each class has three skill trees, and with each level gained, a skill point to allocate.

There's a slight issue I have in that the game almost offers too much freedom here - you can allocate skill points poorly which makes the final act a difficult struggle. There's no way to fix a broken character, and there's no initial direction to stick to a few skills and pump them full of skill points. A new player can find themselves wanting to try everything out and being very weak later on. Also, not all skills are created equal - some are brutally effective, some are pretty bad. I want to temper this criticism with some praise, however, as the game allows for many different and viable (if not extremely challenging) play types. Still, it would have been nice if there were some suggested templates - dumping everything into Bone Spear and Bone Spirit as a Necromancer may be a good idea for player versus player combat, but it's kind of useless when you're fighting tons of very strong demons late in the game. There's no indication for a new player of what skills might be pointless. Keep in mind I'm dropping a 10 on the game, so this complaint is minor. It just sorta sucks to get through the game and struggle through Act 4 and your character will never be viable for Nightmare difficulty on the first go around.

The game is broken up into 4 acts, each with a town area to start, and a sprawling outdoor area often filled with dungeons and punctuated with some form of dungeon or castle at the end. Completing these acts can take a good long while the first time, and they feature a wide variety of environments and monsters. Once finished with the Normal difficulty, there is Nightmare and Hell, and players can continue with increased difficulty, starting the game over twice more and gaining high levels and pumping some of the stronger skills full of skill points. It's a very nice way to keep a player tied to a character for much longer than the standard exploration of the world, killing of many monsters, and resolution of the story.

The story itself is a solid continuation of the original Diablo, and there are many cool moments, twists and CG cut-scenes in between acts. There are also a few familiar faces, notably Deckard Cain, such that people who played the original Diablo will certainly get a bit more enjoyment out of the game. The story revolves around some great evils trying to possess the world, and a heroic effort from low level rogues to major angels trying to stop them. You probably won't get too caught up by the story, as it moves slowly and it's just not that gripping, but the way some scenes unfold is pretty cool.

Atmosphere in the game is top notch. Each area has its own feel and ambient music, each monster type unique sounds and actions/intelligence, and the design of the word and dungeon elements works very well for the game. The outdoor areas are large and sprawling and randomly generated (there are some pre-defined bits here and there, same with dungeons) and give players a lot of opportunity to explore and hack through any foul beings in their way (and there are many foul beings!). There are a couple areas that feel almost too large and sprawling, such as Act 1 Jails and the outdoors of Act 3, where maybe paring away 1 section would be appropriate. I'm not going to ask for less game though. These large areas come with Waypoints, which allow the player to teleport to other Waypoints. There's always one in town, so once the player finds the Waypoint for an area, travel back to town and other desired areas becomes very rapid. This is very useful for moving through the story, but crucial when you want to repeat specific areas in the game to grind for experience.

One more bit about atmosphere in Diablo II - I always loved the music in the battle.net lobbies. I often left myself in them while doing other things around the apartment so I could listen to the music.

Graphically speaking, Diablo II effectively uses sprites in a 3/4 overheard point of view, and it works very well for the game type. It's not bad looking at all, though it wouldn't ever win 'best graphics'. Everything looks clear and distinct, some of the effects/attacks look terrific, and even the worst stuff in the game looks "all right". You can tell what everything is, the designs are good, and the animations are at worst functional.

So far we have some great fundamentals for a PC action-RPG type of game, except we haven't talked about the two most important and compelling elements of Diablo II: the simple and addictive gameplay, and the complex and addictive loot/equipment system.

As the title of the review suggests, you'll do a lot of clicking. You'll click on enemies to attack them, and click on the map to move. There are some hot keys and early on you just need to click an enemy once to continue melee hacking at it, though I think most people probably just click the hell out of it anyway. It's awesome. You're given an action with each mouse button and can use hot-keys (almost typed Hot Cops there!) to toggle what the mouse buttons do. You also have a belt with potions to drink to restore life/mana. You have one big red orb on the left which keeps track of your life, and a big blue orb on the right, which keeps track of your mana. Your abilities/magic use up mana, so you have to manage this. It's a little tricky early on, but access to good equipment and skills later on are very helpful for this.

Pretty simple, really - assign skill, use hot-keys to switch, and click away.

The real compelling element of the game? Loot. Items. Treasure. Equipment. The game has a deep system of producing treasures from chests and bosses and random little enemies, one that has been measured out and worked into class builds and equipment setups, tying to balance effective damage output and the ability to get the best items. I could spend forever talking about the loot system, instead I will just say that the game puts some of the best loot just far enough that you'll be able to reach out and grab it, but just a little bit at a time and once you pluck one fruit from the tree, there's another just within reach...

Item runs are extremely popular and common, as are experience runs. Players have determined many favorite routes to getting items and experience to enhance their characters. The gameplay is addictive and fun such that it's enjoyable to go on these runs over and over. Character building is also compelling for whatever reason, so that element gets thrown in there as well. Perhaps it works in the same way slots ultimately are addictive, in that an unexpected reward after searching stirs up a lot of endorphins from the brain. It used to work for primitive humans when searching for food, but it's the same trigger gambling addicts are hooked into and I think games like Diablo and many MMORPGs are, too.

Diablo II differs from MMORPGs, though. Online is quick and easy, up to 8 players in a game playing together or in different areas. Monster level increases with more players, and working together on loot/experience runs is often the quickest way to do it. You can hop into a game from battle.net very quickly and very finished quickly as well, and onto the next game. MMORPGs tend to involve far more interaction and planning, which is certainly to their benefit, but not everyone wants to spend forever on each enemy and hoping to sniff a new item once a week.

So if you get caught up in Diablo II, you'll probably plow through the story once, figuring out what types of skills are effective for one class. You might play with the other characters next, going online to figure out what skills to use, and then plowing through the game over and over, engaging in really fun action, dominating demons and goblin thingies, tearing down bosses and getting their treasures, over and over. It's addictive and fun, and it's easy to stop playing at almost any point and turn the game off for the night. Perfect game in terms of how broad the spectrum of playtime can be - you can play for 10 hours straight easily as the day vanishes before you know it. You can also chip in 20 minutes and see your character increase in some way, at pretty much any level.

There's Hardcore mode for people that want a true challenge, which means that a character's death is the end of the character. Usually you just run over from town and pick up your stuff after dying, but in hardcore you just kiss it all good bye and start over. It can be rewarding to succeed, and emotional to lose a character you've invested in. Everyone should try it at least once.

There's also some PvP to be had, though it's up to the players to define the rules of engagement. Blizzard allows a player to declare himself hostile, which can lead to some grief tactics and enables some people to be rude and annoying. It also means people can choose to engage in combat and fight each other... the characters aren't balanced for PvP, which means PvP takes on it's own social entity with people finding builds that work best for PvP, or agreeing to form a community that has its own rules in place to balance characters. It adds depth to the game experience and prolonged my enjoyment of the game for over year, though I almost think it's an inadvertent side effect of just giving griefers a reason to want to buy the game.

And yeah, with battle.net you get some really good people, a sea of normal people just trying to join the flood of Secret Cow Level runs, and a select few morons that are selfish, dumb, and/or rude. It leads to some games/groups being amazing, most are all right, and some games can be ruined, though like I said, most games are pretty good and the other players don't hinder you. There are also issues with dupes which I can go either way on - if you want to play without them, there's no reason you have to deal with them too much. At the same time, it can devalue your own legit equipment if you want to trade for stuff with other people. I don't think this is really anything you can pin on Blizzard - the good far outweighs the bad and any game with an open community is going to have bad eggs.

The only thing in Diablo II that is outright bad - Stamina. It's a boring and useless attribute that bogs down the first few hours of the game and then you pretty much don't deal with it again, aside from a few patches of Act 2. It's just upkeep without any reward whatsoever, and you can run out of it quickly at level 1 such that you just slowly plod along (you need Stamina to run). People don't play Diablo II to manage their Stamina early on by standing around from time to time or having yet another potion to drink (and it comes at a time when you have the least inventory space to spare, too).

Other than that, everything else in the game is either awesome or at least functional. The game can eat away hundreds, even thousands of hours of your life. At the same time, you don't have to skip out on social occasions or stay up late to enjoy it (though you might do either from time to time!). The controls are simple and the gameplay is both fun and addictive, which means for $50 at launch, you have a ridiculous bang for your buck and easily one of the best games of all time.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 12/23/08

Game Release: Diablo II (US, 06/29/00)