Diablo 2 Resurrected
Publisher: Activision/Blizzard Entertainment
Sale Price: £20
I can still remember the first time I ever played Diablo 2, it was at a Lan party with friends. The group, a mixture of mainly boys and girls, used to assemble at the end of every month at a friend's house. By early evening, the entire troop had gathered in the backyard of the garden, once there, we would dine away on a scrumptious serving of barbecued steaks, burgers and smuggled in-beer.
I can still recall those nights like it was yesterday. The rocking sounds of Twisted Sister and Metallica blasting out loudly, the constant complaints from a pair of extremely irate old-next-door neighbors and to top it all off, an annoying couple that used to sit on a sofa for the entire evening, talking to no one and just kissing the night away. Everyone hated that couple.
Once the feasting had ended, our entourage of would-be heroes would venture indoors, into a make-shift hall room that had been modified with lanes of long desks and chairs. Some technical Wiz-kid back in the day by the name of Derek had figured out how to link everyone's PCs together, and with it, a new world of gaming entertainment had been born.
After sitting ourselves down, we would then embark on a night of gaming misadventure. As for the games on display, only the best of a generation was in session.
Games like Star-craft, Quake, Red Alert, Duke Nukem and a particular game called Diablo 2 were all on show. These masterpieces not only entertained us but corrupted our very souls.
I cannot recall the number of times my friends and I attempted to speed run our way through the acts, trying to get to Diablo as fast as possible or our relentless pursuit for loot as we farmed Mephisto literally to death.
As the night grew long and the dawn of a new day broke, our exhausted huddle of adventures would lay down our weapons, (that's gamer code for keyboards and mice) and venture out into the real world in search of Michelin grade sustenance, (that's teenage talk for let's meet up at the local MacDonald's.)
Once there we would fine dine away on the grandest of all teenage foods, (egg mac-muffins and crappy-tasting coffee.) As the morning progressed, we would reminisce about the events of the previous night. A loud crackling roar of laughter for the person who blew themselves up, trying to rocket jump for the first time, or a ring of envious glares, reserved for that special person that found the rarest of all precious loot.
It was a time of pure gaming bliss and I have missed those days deeply.
Diablo 2 will always have a special place in my heart, so it was with great anticipation that I heard that it would be receiving a fresh coat of paint with the newly announced Diablo 2 Resurrected.
So, with that silly childhood memory out of the way, let's get into it.
Welcome to my review of Diablo 2 Resurrected.
As far as I am concerned Diablo 2 is for all sense and purposes is still the King of all action RPGs. If, for some bizarre reason you never played the original back in the day, and the names of Deckard Cain, Wirt or Tyreal don't mean diddly squat to you, well, quite frankly, Shame on you.
Keeping with the theme of this review, if you don't recognize this iconic musical score, you should burn in hell.
There have of course been many great pretenders to Diablo's throne over the years. Fan-favorites like Titans Quest, Dungeon Siege, Torchlight, and even more modern-day classics like Path of Exile and Grim dawn have challenged but IMO have always just fallen short.
Side-bar. Grim dawn is my favorite modern Action-RPG, before my Pc went all Chornobyl and decided to nuke itself, I had invested over 1200 hours into it. Unfortunately for me, said game is now only available on PC and Xbox,(damn you green rats, you have a real gem there) if it was not for this rather vexatious issue, you might have been reading a review of that game instead of Diablo 2 Resurrected.
With the release of Diablo 2 Resurrected, millions upon millions of ancient gamers (i mean this quite literally) flocked back to their dark roots in hopes of rekindling those nostalgic love thoughts of yesteryear.
However, at first glance, you might be correct in thinking that Blizzard has one hell of a high mountain to climb in regards to bringing Diablo 2 up to modern gaming standards, I mean, let's not kid ourselves, just have a look at the picture below, this is what Diablo 2 originally looked like back in the day.
Let's be completely honest here, besides the most hardened of sadomasochists, who in their right mind would want to play a game looking like this in 2022?
Well, if the picture above leaves you slightly a gasp, there is a silver lining to that dilemma and that comes in the shape and form of Diablo2 Resurrected, let's do a few screenshot comparisons shall we?
Can you spot the difference? It's hard to believe that this is actually the same game.
Here is another comparison you won't believe.
There is no other way to say it, Blizzard (Vicarious Visions, the team responsible for the remaster) have simply done a remarkable job here. We are talking about “The Mona Lisa to Ana de Armas” levels of transformation here.
I would happily take on the hordes of hell for this Goddess above.
Every single corner of the world's games map, whether it be from the darkly-lit passages of the catacombs in Act One or to the erupting rivers of flame in act five are now bursting with demonic eye-popping detail.
Gone are those nasty blocky graphics of old only to be completely replaced by a rich tapestry of stunning visual delights.
Every single piece of art/asset in the game has been modernized and the results are revolutionary.
Those dire tiresome resolutions of old, 800x600( Switch users i feel your pain) have been replaced with a beautiful dynamic 1440 60 fps or a 4k resolution at a steady 30 fps, (if your not playing games like this at 60 fps, unfriend me NOW)
Armour, helmets, and weapons not only stand out with their reflective sheens but minute details right down to the most delicate of decals can be seen on the surfaces of the items. (Even fur looks lifelike in its appearance. ( @VFX_Veteran will be extremely pleased by this fact)
Spells too, feel more alive with each cast, orbs, fireballs, and lightning bolts now sparkle with glimmers of illumination as they cascade their way into the dark corridors in front of you
Details such as light shafts can be seen breaching inwards through broken rooftops and open caves, Puddles of blood now boil with the salacious drip of oozing movement, it is a remarkable difference from the crayon-colored scribbles of the past.
The atmosphere in diablo is and, I can not overstate this, is truly hellish in its design now.
Moving on from the obvious display upgrades, what other advancements has the base game received.
Let's talk gameplay.
You will be hard-pressed to find a game that just feels so right in the palm of your hands.
Whether you are a lightning-fury amazon murdering herds of hell-mooing bovine or a sorceress teleporting all the way down to the darkest depths of Baal's throne room, the gameplay loop on the ps5 is a silky-smooth 60 fps, Even under the flooding assault of dozens of hells minions, there is no judder, no lost frames. It's simply stellar.
The controller implementation also works fantastically well to the point that you would be mistaken in thinking that the game was actually designed with it in mind, all the way back in the early 2000s.
Skill bounding can be done quickly and on the fly and believe it or not, there are some situations where I feel the controller actually works better than a keyboard and mouse.
Take the Paladins charge ability for example. There is an automatic targeting system in place when using his charge ability. Press the button once, and your paladin will charge into the first available mob, but keep the button held down and your character will multi-charge into that monster until it dies or with a quick tug on the directional pad you can change your direction at will, this allows your character to zip around the map just like when the sorceress uses her teleport skill. It really feels fantastic in motion.
One small negative that can be attributed to the controller is in its use within the games inventory system. Diablo2 is notorious for having a Tetris-style like inventory system. Moving charms and items around your stash can be a bit of a chore at times, but with that being said, it's a minor inconvenience as best.
As for skills trees, they have also been revamped with numerous synergy's being moved around or updated to reflect a more balanced skill-set.
There is now a host of new class builds that for the first time are now not only viable but are damn right plausible.
Take skills like the sorceress hydra and paladins fist of the havens for example.
Way back in the day, these skills were akin to slapping someone with a wet noodle. (Out beloved head-admin @Darth Vader knows this feeling oh too well) Now, after the re-balance, these skills are not only viable in leveling your character through normal and nightmare difficulties but can take you straight up through hell difficulty, it's an extremely great change.
In the past, the world of Diablo 2 was ruled by the sorceress and Paladins classes to the point that I would say 90% of the game used to be made up of them, but now, with this new release and its patches, I would go as far as saying that every single class is completely viable in the end game.
-Pet builds have been totally reworked, The druids pets, ravens, and wolves can now actually kill things in hell instead of their, “ I do no damage with my peck and nibble antics of the past.”
-The necromancer has had its skeleton mages readjusted with massive buffs, Golems too look fantastic although in my personal opinion they still need some minor tweaking in their damage departments.
-Amazon skills like Strafe( a personal favorite of mine) now shreds through monsters, there is no more hiding in the back of the group why you want for your Pala and Sorc friends to kill everything.
-Barbs, my least favorite class of old have had so many of their skills revamped, that they are no longer laughed at, I mean is there anything worse than a poor man's Conan.
I could go on and on, but trust me in saying this, there will be a class that suits your particular personal play style.
Quality of Life changes.
Another wonderful benefit the game has received is in terms of its quality of life changes. The list is a long one but I will address a couple that I think particularly shine on consoles.
Processes like automatic gold pick and filling up your tomb of town portals or potion belt-up with a single click have brought a new vigor to these most mundane of endeavors,
One of my personal favorite changes is the addition of a new Advanced Tab Menu System. This is a single-page tab where you can view all of your stats with their accumulative effects intact. In the old days, we had to manually calculate such things as magic find, gold-find, etc with a pen and paper. (Thank god for this change)
Besides those welcome additions, another update that blizzard has made is in regards to the new rune-words.
For those out of the loop, rune words are made by combining runes into a socketed armor or weapon. These pieces of equipment can be some of the most powerful and sought-after items in the game. At launch, there were a total of 78 rune-words in the game. Blizzard's plan seems to be to add a total of around seven new rune-words per ladder reset. (that's around every 4-5 months or so)
My beloved infinity spear is completely trans-formative, wielding it makes your character go from powerful to completely godlike.
No Diablo game would be complete with a quick look at some of the game's most iconic loot. At present there are 385 unique items in the game, this does not include complete sets which clock in at 32, of which there are 127 of these pieces individually. The sets now just look fabulous, take the Sigons set for example, one of my absolute favorites.
This set has some fantastic set bonuses and is best used in the normal and nightmare settings of the game
The ever elusive Stone of Jordan, I have found five of these in all of the thousands of hours of magic- finding.
The green Hat or Shako as commonly referred to, is one of the most iconic items in the game
Now with a shed load of positives out of the way, I thought it would be a good time to talk about two particular negatives that people might have with the game, the first being somewhat subjective.
The developers in their divine wisdom decided to remove the TCP- IP functionality from the game, the reason being, that it had potential unseen network insecurities.
What this means in essence, is you are forced to use Blizzard's servers to play the game. To me, this is not an issue but to others, especially those in the modding community, this has completely thrown a spanner in the works in regards to the Diablo modding scene. The old Diablo 2 game was a wash with fantastic mods support. From Path of Diablo to Eastern Sun, these modes completely overhauled the mechanics of the game by adding new monsters, loot modifiers, environments, and so on. Since the removal of those network enablers, you can no longer play these games within Diablo 2 Resurrected. You can still play the original Diablo 2 with these modes but you will be missing out on all the new graphical upgrades from Diablo 2 resurrected if you do so.
The second big issue Diablo 2 Resurrected has, is in its trading system, it's basically none existent.
The truth is, Diablo 2 never had a great trading system. There is no built-in trading system like Path of Exile has, instead you need to either find a trading discord channel or use some of the forum gold sites that exist out there. Unless playing totally self-found, finding fantastic items is hard enough and finding someone to trade said fantastic items can be even harder.
It is a massive issue in the game that Blizzard really needs to remedy in Diablo 4.
Now on to an important part and why this game has been included in the bargain base meant reviews section. In many ways you could argue it does not fit the criteria, weighing in at about £20 pounds is a tad bit on the expensive side, but there are a couple of factors in my reasoning, one being in its longevity.
Blizzard has pledged to continue updating the game for the foreseeable future. Just like diablo3 support with their new seasons, Blizzard intends to release new patches, new rune-words, and perhaps new playable content like a map system as time goes on, this will go a long way towards making this game future-proof.
The Second and most important factor is Value.
With seven fantastic classes to play all with numerous skill branches, This game offers you incredible amounts of value in terms of replayability. I have over 900 hours invested in the game since its official launch in September. In terms of time spent, we are talking about divorce the wife, neglect the kids, and let the pet pooch starve to death values of gaming time here.
If you never played Diablo 2 in the past, here is your chance to rectify probably the worst decision of your life, believe in your inner lemming and make that jump, you will not be disappointed.
Positives
- Gorgeous look game.
- Cutscenes have been completely redone.
- Seven different heroes to play with a huge array of skill trees.
- A staggering amount of content.
- Amazing musical score.
- Time-tested game-play mechanics that still holds up today.
- Much improved over the original.
- Near instant load times.
- 60 fps.
- Unless self-found, trading can be problematic.
- Really needs a map system, something like Path of exiles.
- Ps4 load times are unacceptable for a game like this. Up to ten seconds of load times is an absolute killer in places for a game like this.
- Some old systems are still in place.
Diablo 2 resurrected had the usual blizzard launch day problems, from servers going down, to random crashes to horrendous queuing times, thankfully of now, all that bad stuff is sorted and the user experience is a fabulous one.
There is so much more I could have written about the game, but time, effort and particularly length had already exceeded what I wanted this review to be.
Some great links to help you on your Diablo 2 journey.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Dbrunski125
My favorite you-tube streamer, good takes on builds/mechanics.
https://www.youtube.com/c/MrLlamaSC
One of the most popular streamers provides a lot of content/builds etc.
https://www.youtube.com/c/Coooley
Probably the most knowledgeable of Diablo 2 players, pvp-centric content
https://d2.maxroll.gg/
Good site for builds
https://diablo2.io/price-check/
Excellent site for trading and item grading
Icon-Era Game Score 9/10
Nostalgia has never felt better
If you enjoy these types of reviews, please let me know, they take an extremely long time to produce, this one was has almost clocked in at about 10 days.
Thanks for taking the time to read.
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