Game Review: Diablo 3

 

After Diablo 2 came out in the year 2000 along with its expansion, Blizzard the same company that created World of Warcraft kept promising that would create a sequel to Diablo 2. Year after year, Blizzard put it off until this year in May 2012 when they finally released it. My brother bought himself and me a copy to test it out.

 

Is it a good game? I’d say so yes, but it gets repetitive sometimes. For those not familiar with the Diablo series I can offer a quick synopsis for the third game in the series. The main goal is to defeat the Lord of Hell called Diablo. You choose from five character classes. A barbarian is a slashing warrior with high health and uses heavy armor. Another class is the wizard casting magical attacks. There’s an African witchdoctor shooting blow darts and summoning the undead to fight for him. A demon hunter who fights with a bow and arrow and uses nifty traps. The fifth character class is a monk who fights with marital arts and super natural physical attacks. 

 

This time around in the series, you are now able to choose the gender of your character. In the first and second game if you played a wizard, that character could only be one set gender. A man in the first game and a woman in the second game. In both the first and second Diablo a barbarian was always a man. Seemed kind of silly that if you wanted to play a wizard you could only play as a woman in the second game. Now both genders are available for every class in the third game. 

 

The game play is simple using your mouse you left click as your main attack and right as a secondary attack. To move your character around just left click and your character will move there. Your character gets to click and kill lots of zombies and horrible monsters in your way to gain experience and gold. Over time your character levels from one to a maximum level of sixty to become stronger. 

 

One nifty thing about Diablo 3, as you come across a new enemy you see a pop up on your screen saying "new lore." Click it and you’ll hear an actor’s voice describing the enemy monster to you. For example imps within the game are described to be small, but capable of tearing apart flesh with their needle teeth. Blizzard wanted to accomplish fantasy with a touch of horror and they do a good job of it.

 

When you pick a character you start out on your adventure going from town to dungeon progressing through the game in four acts each act taking you to a separate location. The fourth and final act you fight Diablo himself, beating the game ... or do you?

 

In Diablo one and two, there are three levels of difficulty Normal, Nightmare and Hell. When you defeat normal difficulty defeating Diablo at the end of the fourth act you are able to progress to the next difficulty level Nightmare, then Hell. Luckily you have the option of joining your fight against the demon Diablo with fellow players with a limit of four per group. The game gets harder the more people that are in a game or group together. So you can’t make the game easier by ganging up on the game. 

 

In Diablo 3 there’s a new difficulty called Inferno. In act 3 Hell I was killed a lot, later learning that you needed all resist gear to give you resistance to all elements. If you didn’t have gear like that, well I already knew what would happen. The elements you needed resistance to were fire, arcane, poison, and cold and electricity. Luckily a lady barbarian was nice enough to give me some gear that boosted my resist all. I finally got through to inferno with the correct gear. I was very happy when I defeated the end boss of the first act of Inferno called the butcher. When I defeated the butcher, a giant demon using hooks and floors of fire killing adventuring heroes, I unlocked a banner I wanted: a griffin icon for my banner.  (Yes I like griffins very much.) Something new in the Diablo series is that you get to create your own banner with various colors and sigils. Like a banner you would see with a medieval clan or house or king or queen. As you progress through the game earning achievements you earn various designs for your banner.

 

 However when I tried act two in Inferno I died fairly quickly despite the fair amount of all resist gear I had on my barbarian character. Blizzard did a good job of making Inferno beyond hard. Instead of blowing gold on repair bills I went back to act one in Inferno to earn gold to buy better equipment.

For those who played World of Warcraft, Blizzard carried over the auction house (called AH for short) over to Diablo 3. Compared to EBay, you can bid on new armor pieces for your character or a new shiny weapon to smite the demons of Hell. Like any RPG or Massively multiplayer online role-playing game or for short MMORPG. The player becomes more powerful by looking for or buying new equipment for his or her character in the game world. The game wouldn’t be much fun if you could only use the same equipment you started with throughout the whole game.

 

Diablo 3 does have an amazing amount of gear for each character to equip. For example a helmet or helm name could be something like a "masked aurora or a knight’s hunger." A dagger could be called a "grisly point" or a "death abyss." Or the dagger I currently have is a shiv revenge. One neat thing about weaponry is sometimes they come with element damage like poison or fire that add to the graphics and add to the damage you inflict per attack. Another neat thing is that sometimes when your character kills an enemy you see the enemy’s dead body fly across the screen as your character forces it back with the power of your attack. Also if you attack with a certain element it adds to the death of the enemy. Attacking with a poisoned weapon leaves the enemy as a diseased husk with a green sickly aura and poison cloud. Or a fire weapon leaves the enemy as a burning blackened husk.

The gear itself comes as a few colors. White is plain ordinary gear blue is step up offering some boosts. Yellow is a lot better than blue. Green is a set item that comes with 2 or more other items in the set. When you complete or add to the set you get additional bonuses. Orange is legendary and rarely found.

 

Some enemies by themselves die with graphical bravado. A demon in the fourth act burns dying and leaves behind a skeleton that blackens and turns to black ash. Another demon dies with its head and body erupting with its inner organs bursting through a large tear. The graphics are pretty amazing to the environments you fight in, or as explained before, the enemies dying. Also the magical attacks are neat to look at too. The wizard can blast away demons with a bright beam of magical doom on your screen. The witch doctor can attack with frogs or balls of fire.

 

For another challenging aspect within the game is the option of hardcore characters available when you reach level 10 of any character class. In the regular gameplay when you die you lose 10% or your gear’s durability which costs gold to repair at npc vendors. When you play as a hardcore character and you die you die like a real life death. No coming back end of your character game over. Before I wrote this article I tried a hardcore character for kicks. Poor Bubbles only made it to level 7 and is now unplayable as she died a horrible death by skeletons.

 

All in all I’d say Diablo 3 is a fun game to play. It can get repetitive fighting in the same dungeons again and again. The gameplay is fun though and with pretty graphics it’s still fun to play. What’s lacking though, and Blizzard might be working on this, is a pvp option (player vs. player). So you can test your might against fellow players instead of just the demons of Hell. Either way players new to Diablo and those who played Diablo 1 and 2 will still find this an entertaining and challenging game to play.

Grease Coakes