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Diablo (PC) artwork

Diablo (PC) review


"In Diablo, you play the role of a warrior, amazon, or wizard, and you have to go through some dungeon, and kill some evil guy. All of these have special names, but honestly, fourteen retarded monkeys and a goldfish could have written this plot."

Diablo is a decent game from Blizzard. It's far from great, but it's entertaining in a ''Final Fight'' sort of way. That means repetitive gameplay that's fun for a while, but eventually it all becomes boring.

In Diablo, you play the role of a warrior, amazon, or wizard, and you have to go through some dungeon, and kill some evil guy. All of these have special names, but honestly, fourteen retarded monkeys and a goldfish could have written this plot. It's been done around 7.8 million times before. The name Diablo is conveniently the name of the grand evil in the game, also synonymnous through many languages with ''evil''. Quite handy.

At the beginning of the game, you get to choose a character class, either warrior, rogue/amazon, or sorceror/wizard. The warrior uses heavy weapons, such as battle axes and broadswords, but essentially no magic. The rogue can attack from a distance and has some magical ability. The sorceror is the master of magic, but very weak physically. Each class is not created equal however; as the game goes on, the sorceror becomes the most powerful, while in the beginning of the game, the warrior is the easiest class to use.

Diablo's gameplay is amazingly simple and easy to use, which is a double-edged sword. The left mouse button is used to execute almost everything, from attacking enemies to collecting items. The right mouse button launches magical attacks. It keeps things simple, but also limits a lot of the gameplay. You'll be thirsting for more depth about halfway through the dungeon.

Yes, I did say ''the dungeon''. The entire game takes place in one dungeon and in one town, so you better learn to love it. If Diablo suffers from one main problem, it's repetition. The dungeon levels look the same, the enemies look the same, the game plays the same, you do everything the same, ect. There's almost no story to drive the game forward, so the only reward you get for all this work is perfecting your character.

The enemies themselves aren't too hard, or too smart. Most attack in one of two patterns - hit and retreat, or long range and run. Few enemies, excluding the bosses, will stick around and fight blow to blow with you. All the enemies in the game can be defeated by the process of hitting then running. The boss characters and sudden ambushes of huge enemies in enclosed rooms provide the only danger of dying, and even then a quick teleportation spell or scroll saves you from oblivion.

Diablo has a multiplayer function, but it's so bad it's hardly worth mentioning. Online play is free on Battle.net, and very popular, but cheating is so rampant that you can't win unless you cheat yourself. The cheating is so wild that the entire multiplayer access by Battle.net is worthless. You can play the game on a LAN network, or by direct IP connection, but neither offer a wide scale player base, unless you're in a really big office (and tolerant to be paying you for playing on the job).

Graphically, Diablo wasn't bad for it's time. It's a bit prettier and nicer than Quake, a game released about the same time. However, it does feel darker and grittier than Warcraft 2, a game released earlier by Blizzard.

Sound... Well, at least it's not Britney Spears. It's the typical ''dark and dreary dungeon, oh no scary!'' crap that's in most dark and dreary dungeon crawling role playing games. The effects are very annoying, and will be turned off within five minutes of playing. It's mostly grunting and groaning from the main character, and while that may sound appealing, it really isn't.

Overall, Diablo is a very overhyped game. Is it great? Not really. Some people are blinded of it's mediocrity by the excellence of Diablo 2, but Diablo doesn't offer outstanding gameplay, just repetitiveness.



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Community review by sgreenwell (Date unavailable)

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