Diablo IV continues on Blizzard's dumbing down of design bringing games ever closer to mindless mobile games. Hope you like left clicking!

A real bummer because the art finally nails the Diablo 1 esthetic in incredibly detailed 3D, it's gorgeous. The music follows the original vibe without turning into cheesy references and having it's own voice. The story's even better than I expected!
But none of this can save the incredibly controlled game design refusing to give any freedom to whatever class you've picked.
No, you'll only unlock a few skills every few levels even though the ones available in each circles are very redundant.
No, you won't equip more than 6 skills total (including your basic attack) because why would you wan't to make complex combos, right? Forget making any elaborate multi skill trap / attack / movement synergies, D4 wants you to have a controlled balanced build and force you to play with multiple other players so that you can't do everything on your own.
No, levels won't be meaningful. In fact they feel completely useless as monsters level up instantly with you. Why would you care about getting more powerful if enemies do at the same time. This is Skyrim syndrom, everything is set to your level and it's as efficient to just run through the oversized maps filled with boring loot as to killing everything. The loot isn't even linked to the areas either, they are set to your level. You'll always find something better, which you'll need because you leveled up and made the monsters stronger in doing so. It feels so gamey and immersion breaking.
The game is filled to the brim with idiotic systems that feel right out of a mobile game, that don't quite make sense in an RPG that should immerse you in the world. The game tells you exactly how many steps and quests remaining in the current quest / act so that you know when you ve checked all the boxes: you wouldnt want to have any surprises in the story, would you? At each step of quests, gold and items magically appear in your inventory because we need to constantly feed the slot machine addict players and maintain the belief that they are "progressing".
Once you step back and look at the mechanics, it is shockingly obvious how it is designed to create a mindless loop where players are constantly given a thumbs up no different than mobile games giving you a pat on the back every 10 seconds. There is no thinking involved, builds are incredibly basic ( are you doing bleed ? no, then you're doing berserking) with each skill only having 2 specific upgrades clearly lined with just 3-4 kind of build in mind. Wouldn't want you to get creative, woah!
Surprisingly I also found the controls pretty bad with my character regularly getting stuck in walls. Would have expected that to be super slick considering Blizzard's high production quality.

D4 gets incredibly boring after a handful of hours and monotony steps in as you watch thousands of meaningly critters gib and drop pathetic piles of gold.
But hey, still better than Diablo 3 which couldn't even boast such great art direction.

If you're looking for a similar game with any kind of depth, go play Path of Exile.

I bought the game a whole year ago and have never been able to play without rubber banding or lag that makes the game borderline unplayable for me. My connection is fine as I can play any other game without issues, it is just this game.

Even tried to contact Blizzard's customer services and they just assume the problem is on my side and not theirs. I made it to Act V but just got tired of this Always Online bullshit that runs like ass. The trade-off is some shitty MMO mechanics I do not even care about.

Impossible to recommend.

I'd like to start by saying that I did enjoy this game and found it to be a lot of fun. The plot was interesting enough and fighting hordes of creatures is always fun. I chose the Necromancer class as that's my personal favourite, I find it takes some of the repetitiveness away from ARPGs when you're able to raise skeletons and have them fight for you.

My only complaint is the multiplayer aspect to the game. The fact that it's always online lead to errors, like getting logged out mid cutscene and not being able to log back in for at least 15 minutes. The seasonal stuff looks interesting but doesn't really concern me as I don't really dive into endgame stuff unless there's something to strive for.

Hopefully whenever they get around to making another Diablo game, it'll be offline with the option of co-op.

A perfect example of modern Blizzard game - boring, obsessed with trying to remind you of the older games you actually liked, and full of repulsive monetization. Very strange to watch a developer who used to be known for sturdy, focused gameplay peppered with pretty cutscenes make a game that's so at war with itself.

I wanna stress that I am not a hard mark for games like this. I love a good braindead podcast game. But if you're going to interrupt my numb clicking every 30 seconds with long-ass dialog, it better be good.

And it's just not. It's standard issue Blizzard writing - good at capturing character voice, miserable at building to any kind of cohesive plot. Also they made yet another evil, sexy monster lady.

Combine that with the easiest gameplay in the series - unbelievable that they cap the difficulty until you beat the whole story - and you have a boring game that doesn't even have the decency to shut up and let you turn your brain off. Talk to this quest giver, your season pass level increased, zone rewards available, you got a paragon point, world boss will spawn soon, buy customization packs with platinum!

This is not a game, it's a busy box for children who know their parent's credit card number.

Difficult to write a review when all I've done is finish the campaign of a game so focused on its post-game like Diablo IV. I think in comparison it's fair to say that I prefer the art direction here than in Diablo III, and the plot is more interesting overall. But the progression and gameplay of III were better to play, and of course, I enjoyed playing Crusader over any class in Diablo IV as well (Barbarian is not nearly as satisfying to use).

It's a shame that my co-op partner liked the game much less than I did as well.

Playtime: 20 Hours
Score: 4/10

A new mainline entry that feels more like Diablo 3.5. So I'm a fan of Diablo as it was the first ARPG I ever played and I even remember the day I got the OG Diablo 2 for my PC and just being blown away by the atmosphere and the fun gameplay, even though by that point the game was several years old. Fast forward years later, I played Diablo 3 when it hit PlayStation and I really enjoyed that game despite it being divisive amongst fans. So what did I think of this one?

To start with the positives, the combat as always is a lot of fun. I played a Necromancer since that was my go to class in Diablo 2 and I had a lot of fun with it, especially once I got the corpse explosion which is always my favorite. I also like that transmog is in this game, which allows you to change the look of all the gear you pick up, so you always look the way you want to. I say that since it was in Diablo 3, but I was worried Blizzard would get very aggressive and paywall the feature each time you want to change the look of an item. I'm glad they at least showed restraint there. The music is also very good with the tracks sounding different to past games but still very epic. And though this is an always online game (more on that later), the game was very stable for me with no server issues and players generally just kept to themselves, so nothing bad there. Lastly I thought Lilith was a cool villain and was a nice change up from just having Diablo come back again.

That's sadly where the positives end for me. The game, while fun, just honestly gets very boring after a while for various reasons. The game is open world with segmented regions, kind of like Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning's open world, but exploration honestly barely felt any different to Diablo 3. You're still running around large open fields, with demons around every corner with the occasional chest tucked away somewhere. There are dungeons, but these are all just copy and pasted, with not much to differentiate them other than what enemies you're fighting in them. Side quests are okay, but I've seen better in other games and these get boring after a while. While the visuals do have a more gothic tone to fit the first two games, it lacks that oppressive atmosphere I felt when I played Diablo 2. It honestly just feels like Diablo 3 with Diablo 1+2 skin over it visually.

Leveling is back to traditional skill trees which I do like as it lets you make different builds within the same class. The issue is once you hit level 50, you stop getting skill points and instead get paragon points which lets you access a separate tree. But most of these are just basic stat upgrades and don't really let you continue to tailor a unique build. The combat is fun like I said it but it quickly starts to feel trivial as the game is just WAY too easy. Why don't you turn up the difficulty you might ask? You can't since this game uses a world tier system similar to Diablo 3 with you only having access to easy and normal at the start with hard and nightmare only unlocking AFTER you beat the main campaign which just sucks man. I get this is a live service game with an MMO feel, but just let me increase my difficulty for god sakes. I am not going to continue to play your game after the main story, so stop trying to dangle higher difficulties like a carrot to me.

Loot is also very basic and boring in this game as most of the time when I found a new weapon, it just felt like a simple stat increase for me and only the legendaries had some cool effects, but these were too far in between.

Another thing they took out from D3 was the companion system which I really missed here. In D3 you got 3 companions who could accompany you when you went out into the world. And while ya these companions were rendered mute if you were playing in co-op, I still liked having them since I mostly play these games in single player. I enjoyed having them with me and then learning more about their backstories when I went back to town. It was something I really missed here.

Lastly is the story, which while interesting, it's not enough to make up for the other issues I mentioned. You do get CG Blizzard cutscenes during the main quests which are always cool to watch, but that's about the only thing they did to enhance the storytelling. I honestly didn't care about most of the side characters and the ones that were decent, I've again seen similar characters in other open world RPGs done better. Also what I found weird is when you talk to NPCs in the game and it's still the top down view point, the camera will zoom in slightly while you talk to them but it's still the top down view, which just felt very pointless to me and after a while it just got annoying. But the actual main story was just okay, as you're mostly just chasing down Lilith and when you get to a location she's at, you learn she's already moved on and then you get a cutscene from her perspective. Again, she's a cool villain but it's not enough to keep my attention with everything else being so bland and I honestly found D3's story to be a lot more engaging. My little hot take for you Diablo fans XD

So ya, that's my thoughts on this game. I'm just not a live service game fan as I feel like they're the bane of the industry and the killer of dev creativity and it just didn't do much to forcibly make Diablo 4 a live service. I didn't talk much about the monetization since the game doesn't force it down your throats but it's still awful with its prices. You want money for horse armor? Get the heck out of here!

All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/

+ Gameplay
+ Decent story
+ Graphics, atmosphere
+ (Personally) Casual enough, easy to pick up and play
- Possibly shallow for more hardcore fans
(Played approximately one year after launch, during season 4 when the looting was reworked, massively improved compared to the launch version)

Diablo IV's second go round with the "Loot Reborn" overhaul as well as a bunch of other progression related changes have made a marked increase in quality of the game. I still probably won't play it for more than a couple of weeks as even in it's improved state it doesn't hold a candle to D2 or PoE, but it's definitely much improved from the initial release. Another compliment I can levy at the updated version of the game is that during this playthrough I haven't been constantly hounded to spend money on stupid crap every five minutes. The microtransactions are sectioned off in areas where you don't have to engage with them unless you choose to.

often when a mediocre live service comes out people will go "the bones are good, just wait a year or 2 and itll be great!". d4 is so fundamentally awful though that this day won't ever come. for the game to be good, the open world, level enemy scaling, loot, online integration, mount-heavy level design, radiant activities, endgame philosophy, and power philosophy all need to be either completely reworked or entirely removed (i'm looking at you, mounts). there's no saving this one

or, in short, D4 bad