GAME REVIEW: Diablo IV (XBox Series X)

 (Look To The Stars - Hans Zimmer)

In the 'Action Role-Play Game' genre, there are games, and then there are Diablo-Style games. Those who know, know.

Diablo wasn't the first series to do the style of gameplay that many people have come to know and love, the dungeon crawler looter cum RPG. Like so many of Blizzard's other works, however, it has become the most well-known example of it. (I'm looking at you, Starcraft and World of Warcraft.)

Unfortunately, Blizzard is also known for something else: Taking its sweet time to release a game. To fully understand this, we kind of need to step back and look at a quick bit of history. See, the OG Diablo came out in 1996. Blizzard followed that up with Diablo II, the game that would arguably cement the Diablo series as video game royalty. Ask any gamer around in the day and they'll probably tell you that, pound for pound, Diablo II was an absolute monster.

Then Blizzard goes silent for TWELVE YEARS. When they finally resurface with Diablo III, it's ...well, it's a different world. A lot has happened in the world in twelve years, especially these twelve. The modern incarnation of what we now know as the Internet happened. 9/11 happened. Smart phones happened. Social Media happened. Broadband data access happened. The 24-hour news cycle shrank to 24 seconds. 4G LTE was launched.

What had Blizzard produced in those 12 years with Diablo 3 was, by all accounts, a rousingly successful sequel. Diablo felt fresh and new again. It was easy to play too, being Blizzard's first real foray into taking this kind of gameplay to consoles as well as PCs. Its only real flaw was a lack of game and server stability so profound during its first few weeks that it remains a legendary example of what not to do to this day, nearly another 12 years later.

It's curious to think that it took Blizzard another 12 years to make the next Diablo game. (It didn't, of course. We will quietly draw a veil over the colossally controversial 'Diablo: Immortal' for mobile.) Still, perhaps they'd used that 12 years wisely as they had the last time.

Did they?

I'm not so sure. 'Diablo IV' is a game of incredible highs and lows. The highs are some of the best parts of video gaming that I've experienced in a long while, especially from a game at launch. This is a remarkably well-realized title. It's super-easy to fall from those highs though, and the trip down to the lows happens soooo fast. And once you're down there, it feels like it takes a lot to get you back on the level again. The whole game resonates with this feeling and I'm honestly not sure if it was worth the trip.

STORY

The angels and demons of Sanctuary are back at it again and it's up to humanity to survive it. We're past the point of thinking that we could stop Heaven or Hell from causing problems though, and 'Diablo IV' emphasizes this strongly throughout its story. It's an enjoyable enough story with a strangely sympathetic villain and a cadre of 'good guys' that are becoming very, very easy to hate. I'll spare you the spoilers but by the time the main campaign ended, I found myself... tired. (And more than a little bored at several different points.) There were absolutely moments of, "Holy crap, can this please be over now?"

We're four games into every single person failing to learn from their mistakes. Demons are bad guys, Angels aren't nearly as good as they should be, most of humanity is too stupid to realize either of these things, and a small selection of said humans are going to somehow end up responsible for temporarily fixing all of it. Worse, while there's a fair amount of fan service in the story, the game makes several very curious decisions to ignore -A LOT- of the previous three games. 

AUDIO/VIDEO

Blizzard has historically done both of these things really well, and Diablo IV continues that tradition on, both to its benefit and its detriment. The audio is perfect. The game's sound design is just flat out exquisite, bringing in just enough sound effects from previous titles that we all feel instantly at home while also offering a whole slew of new noises that do their jobs at peak efficiency without overstaying their welcome. My only real gripe about the sound in any capacity is the voice acting. Many Blizzard stalwarts return from previous games and they're old friends to me at this point. That said, outside of the primary performances, the rest of the voice acting runs the gamut from unremarkably Russian to painfully bad Russian.

The music is flawless. Period. Diablo built its musical legacy on a hauntingly delayed 12-string guitar. That sound has carried through four games now and it's a part of the nightmare that I'm always happy to return to.

The video is...

Okay, the game is gorgeous from a technical standpoint. A lot of people gave Blizzard stick with Diablo III for the game looking too bright and colorful and cartoon-y. (I don't personally agree with this sentiment at all and LOVED Diablo III's graphics.)  For better or worse, Blizzard listened and created a much more realistic-looking game that, again, is gorgeous.

It's just...mostly gorgeously bland and ugly and unremarkable.

The first part of the game takes place in a high, tundra-light mountain setting, so ... you see tons of snow. Lots and lots of white, and occasionally reflected patches of ice. It's boring after about 5 minutes. Then you transition into a lower part of the world where snow gives way to...mud. Lots of mud. Some water. Mostly mud though. Boring. Then you get to a more barren part of the world where you find...sand. Sand and rocks. All bland. All boring. This makes a few of the game's locations with vegetation and mixed scenery really pop but that's way too sparse for my liking. This is the ugliest pretty game I've ever played.

The monsters -- and characters for the most part -- are equally as bland. I have a very large TV and even there, one human-shaped mob looks the same as another. This is a shame because if you get REALLY close, you'll notice that like every other part of the world, Blizzard's designers have done a TON of work. This is no more evidence than in the character models for the heroes. The armor and weapon models and textures are just stunning. You just....can't see them most of the time.

GAMEPLAY

Like the A/V for the game, 'Diablo IV' is full of insane victories in the gameplay space.

In a lot of ways, 'Diablo IV's gameplay feels very, very familiar. That's deliberate. When it works, it works incredibly well. You'll quickly find yourself wandering through twisting halls and countrysides clicking away happily to kill things with flashy skills that will put a smile on your face.  You'll revel in your loot and in the trail of carnage that you left up to it, and you'll squeal a little if something pretty drops. This is 'Diablo IV's party piece and it's one of the things that has made the series so long-lived.

It's only when the game slows down a little that you start to see the warts, and there are a lot of them. The first really big one, maybe the biggest one, is the character skill tree. It's just shotgunned up there. There are SO. MANY. THINGS. for you to invest in and consider, and the game doesn't give you any guidance on how to do this. While the game has a much-needed re-spec system for skill points that you want to invest differently after the fact, you have to realize the necessity of this in order for that to be useful...and new players simply won't, not without going to the internet and asking it for the best Diablo IV Necromancer Build. Earlier versions of the game were, all of them, better about this. Skill trees were varied but straight forward. Diablo III's skill system was probably the best, offering you a mostly linear skill progression with each 

In contrast, Diablo IV's skill system is much more like an MMORPG -- we'll get back to this point in a minute -- including the myriad number of combinations that you can potentially choose from. Once you know what you need to invest in to accomplish the type of character you want, it's pretty straight forward, but getting to that point takes research...and that's my problem with it. I don't want to have to research characters. I want to start a character and love it right out of the chute. Unfortunately, you can't even begin to approach the full potential of any of the character classes without a lot of forethought. This is no more exemplified than with the humble Barbarian, the class that used to be the most Point And Shoot of them all. The poor Barb starts in a state that could charitably be called 'impotent'. This doesn't change without a lot of careful and deliberate skill choices...aaaand even then, it's not really a super enjoyable character to play until at least level 40. That's a long way to go for what used to be the easiest class to jump into. No, this is not an improvement. What you gain in flexibility with Diablo IV's system is completely overshadowed by what you lose.

I wish that covered the flaws of the skill system but there's another problem with the way Diablo IV handles skills: They don't make you feel a lot stronger for a long, LONG time.

Enemies in Diablo IV auto-level with you. Because of that, you never get the really addictive feeling of walking into a room full of things that used to give you trouble and just mowing them down. Your character gets more complicated to run, gets more power, gets more flexibility and yet... Yes, this stops being as much an issue after level 50, at which point you promptly run into yet another issue: The Paragon system. I can only imagine that someone was looking at the Skill Tree situation and thinking, "This isn't complicated or poorly explained enough. We can do better."

If the skill system was the only serious gameplay issue with Diablo IV, I might be able to overlook it but it's not. The game also has a huge, massive, sun-blottingly large problem with repetitiveness. Every zone is named the same thing, just with different words. Most zones look the same, feel the same, and play the same. Blizzard has taken a solid core of gameplay and design and copied it agin and again.

And again. And again. Aaaaaand again.

This has resulted in a game map that is unarguably massive and full of gameplay opportunity. It's just blatantly obvious that it's the same opportunity over and over again. This makes the rare change-ups in side quests and campaign missions -- of which there are many -- really pop. Then they're over and you're back to running boring fetch quests that have you trotting across a third of the continent to pick up a tuft of hair from a badger that might be somewhere in this quadrant of the map before hiking halfway across the world to deliver it.

"But Steve," you cry, "You get a mount to make those journeys go faster!" That's true. The addition of mounts to Diablo IV is a very welcome element by the time you get it, one that brings it even closer to being an MMO. The problem with this is that by the time you get said mount, it feels pointless for two main reasons:

1. You've potentially already got a HUGE amount of the map uncovered depending on how many side quests you've played, and the game is pretty darn generous with waypoints already.

2. The late-game portions of the map are even MORE spread out, so what should be faster travel is negated completely by longer distances.

In the end, the mount just feels like an excuse for Blizzard to tempt fans with more micro transactions, which... yes, they're in the game. So far, they're all cosmetic, so chill out. You want cool looking clothing and are willing to pay for it? Knock yourself out.

I digress.

A lot about Diablo IV reeks of laziness, a word that seems incredibly out of place for how vast the game is. The longer you play the game, the more you'll keep coming face to face with this. There are lazy problems with crafting. There are lazy problems with loot generation. There are lazy problems with storage and with traversal and so many other things. Maybe they're saving some really cool stuff for Seasonal content...but you can't play Seasonal content until you've at least beaten the campaign. Not only is the campaign both huge and a slog, blowing through the campaign means ignoring a lot of side quests, which is where quite a few of the game's high moments are. It's just one more way that Diablo IV feels really at odds with itself.

"But Steve," you protest weakly, "You've sunk a lot of time into the game now! If it's so bad, why've you done that?" I honestly don't know. Nostalgia only takes you so far. The story, maybe? I'm pretty sure I know how it's going to end, and Blizzard isn't known for its twist endings. Maybe the highs in the game are better than I'm giving them credit for. I really don't know. I might start another character or two to check it out. When you start new characters after you've beaten the campaign, you have the option to skip the campaign entirely and just get your levels running side quests and running dungeons...a set of tasks so repetitive that I'm not sure how anyone can see this as a 'Plus'.

In the end, I don't think I can say that Diablo IV is a bad game. I think it's a good one. My problem is that I'm used to it being a GREAT game, and this just isn't. You may buy it. You may play it. You just might not go back to it as much as they'd like you to.