The Casual Gamer’s Overly Delayed Videogame Review of Diablo 3!

Stay Awhile, and Listen!

I’ve been looking forward to Diablo 3 since one of my buddies brought me back a tin of Sinamints from Blizzcon back in 1998. I have fond memories of playing Diablo 1 in middle school with the crappy expansion pack, Diablo 2 in high school with the…. not so crappy expansion pack…. and twelve years, a tin of mints, and a hackintosh later, here it is in all it’s Collector’s Edition Glory!!

(Kitten not included)

It’s a great game but honestly… It’s not perfect.

My main cheese with the game would be, of course, the DRM that prohibits the use of the game unless it can connect to the internet and register with battle.net. It’s annoying at times, since it means I can’t have anything going on in the background or on another computer, but it has its advantages too- all saved characters are on their network as well, so if you decide to play from your laptop one day, all your characters are there waiting for you.

Gameplay is the same ol’ Diablo – lots and lots of mouse clicking with a finger hovering over the shift key. There are new character classes, but really it’s more of the same. You have your magic classes (Wizard, Witch Doctor), your damage classes (Barbarian, Monk), and your sexy class (Demon Hunter) who once again fight the forces of evil (demons, undead, etc) starting in everybody’s favorite desolate town of Tristram. The story, dare I say it, is pretty weak. A star has fallen from the sky and you, the hero, must seek out what it is. One thing leads to another and you’re once again fighting the Lord of Terror, El Diablo himself. While there are one or two plot twists that reveal itself in Act 3, for the most part there isn’t anything new or exciting brought to the table. And upon completion of the Acts (Vague Spoiler Alert!) as in, once you’ve once again killed Diablo- the ending has nothing to do with what becomes of your character, but rather about Heaven which for the entirety of the game was completely passive and useless.

So okay, enough picking on the lack of story. Onto the picking of game mechanics! The game is really easy to complete in normal mode. Most people completed it within a week or two- but the game doesn’t exactly end once you kill Diablo. The game then asks you to play the game over, now with more difficulty. Then again, and again, until you complete the game in Inferno mode. I’m not really a fan of this concept of gameplay. It’s boring. It’s repetitive . It’s…. lazy. I understand that it allows the casual gamer to complete the game and feel good about themselves for slaying Diablo, but at the same time- I am a casual gamer and I’ve already done it! I don’t want to go back to Tristram and do the same old boring storyline over and over again with different difficulties and different class type. It feels like a cop-out and I really wish they had made more of the game as a whole, rather than focus on replay ability. The other issue is farming of items. You have two choices for getting super buff awesome items- either you use your money in the auction house (which uses real money as well as game money), or you play a certain dungeon over and over and over and over and over again until you find what you’re looking for. I tried doing this with Liquid Rainbow, an item required for creation of the Staff of Herding, the game’s “Secret” level. This is only found if a certain NPC generates by the cave at the oasis, and even then do you only have a probability that it might drop in the first level of the cave. I tried farming for this item for hours before rage quitting. I’ll keep doing it because now it’s just a challenge, but it’s a tedious, boring and not really fun experience- at least until I can get to that secret level.

I’m also waiting for a Deckard Cain rap… I mean…it’s gotta happen, right? For old times’ sake?

Out of 5 Tentacles, I give it 3.