Mostly, the things people say that make this game better than the first actually make it worse.

The 8-way shooting makes all weapon items redundant. There is a very limited use for the 3-star weapon, but that's it. This completely eliminates the excitement of getting new weapon items and the strategy of how to use them.

The movement is sort of better in some ways, but it's inconsistent. It's harder to place jumps, and not in a fun way, so you die in ways that are just frustrating.

The settings felt less like an adventure and more like traditional levels. It didn't feel like I was exploring an environment.

Strongly prefer the first one.

pretty but so, so boring.

You can't even increase the difficulty on your first run through. The highest difficulty is 20 hours of braindead clicking and watching particle effects as all your enemies disintegrate.

If you like acting out power fantasies and hate thinking even a little bit, this game is for you. If you like thinking and challenge, avoid.

Like D1, but not as good. A lot of features were added, and intuitively that's good, but D2 suffers from the phenomenon of adding features not because they compliment the mechanics, but because they're cool or fit with the dev's vision or whatever. This means you have too many option to choose from, and therefor there is always some easy way to tackle any solution, and the game becomes too easy with minimal creativity on the part of the player.

That being said, the variety of build options, while degrading to the gameplay mechanics, IS pretty cool and fun to tool around with. Art direction is exceptional for the time, environments are varied and feel unique.

Great game for the time.

If you're coming from Diablo 3, you won't like this game. In D3, you are overpowered af, and you just mindlessly click on everything and watch your power fantasy play out. And I'm talking about your first 20-hour run-through, where you can't increase the difficulty even if you want to. 20 hours of invincible power-fantasy brain-dead clicking. IF THAT'S YOUR THING, D1 is not going to be a fun time for you and I can't recommend it.

If, on the other hand, you like an RPG-inspired action-adventure that requires you to actually make tactical decisions and push yourself, and you are fond of or can tolerate a retro feel, you should dig this game.

The combat mechanics and progression are fantastic. 5/5.
The writing and therefore the relationship management mechanic, which are a crucial part of the game, are terrible. 1/5.
The graphics are terrible for a 2022 engine. Seems like Firaxis just took their XCOM engine and shoved narrative animation into it, and it does not work. 2/5.

The combat and progression is SO good, the game is quite tolerable if you skip all the narrative and relationship management you can. But you still have to pay attention to everything your skipping to make sure you catch enough context to interact with the relationship mechanic appropriately enough to effectively progress your abilities.

This game could have been a 5/5 with compelling writing. As it stands it's one of the most overrated games out there because the writing is SO bad while simultaneously being SO necessary to pay attention to for combat progression.