Diablo 3 is the hollowed out husk of everything interesting the first two games did. The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s heavy on WoW’s art style, which blizzard used on everything at the time. It’s fine here, but I’m not sure the cartooniness quite fits right. Then you get started playing, and you get a taste of the Dota-ey/MMO-ey skill system that’s in use. The loot’s the same way. Actually, at many points in the game, I felt like I was playing a Diablo event for WoW rather than a true blue Diablo game.

It’s funny, because it’s not like Diablo 2 is even that far off from this, but it’s solidly on the other side anyways. There’s a crunch, a crpg quality to it all. It’s not based around cooldowns and active ability combos, it’s scrappier. Less smoothly designed, I guess, but it’s way more engaging.

Again, the loot’s a similar story. Unless you’re at endgame, you can pretty much boil loot down to how many green arrows it has vs how many red ones. It’s less about each piece of gear and more about just getting new gear that does more damage or whatever. I mean Diablo 2’s materialism was never my favorite feature of it, but the personality and connection that system apparently engendered is wholly gone here.

I guess you could call the story more put together in 3? The first act (and the first half of the fifth act) builds the new conflict well, and has some interesting ideas, but every act afterwards gets further from them. Act 2’s fine but feels a bit thin. Act 3 is a retread of Act 5 from Diablo 2, but just more. And Act 4 just feels like a thematic betrayal. Act 5 is, like I alluded to earlier, better. It’s more like Act 1, but by the end it’s thin again. Certainly worth playing if you managed to get through Act 3.

Anyways, this is like Diablo themed jangling keys. They managed to strip the depth out of one of the (on the surface) most straightforward game loops ever, and in doing so just broke it. It’s technically not bad, like it’s a functional game with ideas, but it wasted my time for sure.