The series that paved the road for hack-and-slash and loot-collecting returns in full swing with the release of Diablo IV. It is still the Diablo game you know and love but bigger and more gruesome with the same addicting gear-grabbing gameplay loop as all of its predecessors, plus many character customization options and a huge open-world environment to fight the forces of Hell through in solo or multiplayer play. Despite the visual upgrades and some mechanical tweaks, this is pure Diablo experience at its finest.
The story kicks off with a mysterious evil wreaking havocs in the world of Sanctuary, the human realm caught between the powers of the High Heavens and the Burning Hells. The mysterious figure turns out to be “Mother of Sanctuary”, Lilith the Daughter of Hatred. She and a fallen angel, Inarius, created Sanctuary as a neutral land that’s not binded by the powers of either factions. That worked for a bit until it didn’t as Lilith spreads chaos across the land while Inarius is obssessed over returning to the High Heavens. That’s the main gist of the story, and as for you, the main character, is caught in between the conflict as you were being offered as a sacrifice to Lilith but was saved by a member of an order that aimed to stop the war from happening.
In Diablo IV, you can create a character from one of five classes: rouge, barbarian, druid, sorcerer, and necromancer. The vast character customization allows you to select male- or female-presenting versions with various hairstyles, faces, tattoos, and jewelry. These customizations appear in the game and in cutscenes, though your equipped armor and weapons define your appearance, especially face-covering helmets.
Each class provides a unique playstyle and skillsets to tackle situations. Throughout the campaign and a bit into the late game, I picked rogue and decided on trying out a melee build. Playing a rogue is pretty self-explanatory, you mainly focus on stealth and back attacks that does a lot of damage and staggers enemies. That is really good until you encounter a group of enemies and that is one of rogue biggest weaknesses beside being really squishy is that rogue doesn’t offer any sort of AoE abilities at first.
This is what I love about choosing a class, you aren’t forced to just have the exact same build as everyone else. The revamped skill offers a variety of abilites depends on your needs but lets you equip just six abilities: basic and core (basically heavy) attacks and 4 additional class abilities. Each skill has its own set of upgrades powered by ability points you earn upon leveling up, so you must choose a specific character path. This system allows me to build my rogue that focused on staggering groups with imbuing certain elements into abilites to cause more damage. The varieties of builds are “limitless” and it’s really cool to see different players have different builds that conform to their preferences more.
Diablo IV also does a really great job of netting out abilities and upgrades throughout the journey of level 1 to level 50, with a skill tree that includes basic attacks and ultimate moves. You might think that is it for the build when you reach max level. Instead, reaching max level is when your build is going to be more unique than ever with the re-introduction of Paragon boards. At first, you are given a board to start out and can filled with paragon points that you can get 4 points for every level up. The board only seems to boost certain stats of your character until you reach the second board that allows to focus on which aspects of your build you want to emphasize.
The map of Sanctuary is really vast and definitely the biggest world in all four of the entries. Its overworld is one whole big contigious map isjntead of a set of areas divided by story acts. Sanctuary has five distinct regions, including familiar locations like the Burning Steppes from Diablo II and Caldeum from Diablo III. There’s a good variety of environments, such as a frozen mountainous region, swampland, plains, and jagged shoreline. However, between the Burning Steppes and Kehjistan, there is just a bit too much empty land and desert.
There’s plenty to do besides running through the story quests. Each region has a set of Altars of Lilith to be discovered for permanent stat boosts, dungeons to be cleared for aspects which will change your build’s playstyle a bit and settlements to be found for fast travels. To incentivize players to fully discover all the regions, you get rewards for earning a certain amount of renown that increases potion capacity and gains more skill points. Every region has its own hub city filled with side quests that require you to find people, collect items, or kill enemies. Additional side quests are scattered throughout the wilderness.
There are a lot to like about Diablo IV such as the varieties of things to do, deep character customization and builds and more but there’re some things in the game that bugs me quite a bit. First, let’s talk about mounts, you can get a mount but it’s really late into the game therefore starting out, it was a major pain to traverse throughout Sanctuary. Secondly, the enemies variety is mediorce or average at best, most of the enemies are just reskinned with jacked up heath. Finally, this is really a personal gripe but it seems like whenever you press 2 or more abilities at the same time, there is like a queue that goes in the back ground which slows down or at some point, prevents you from pressing certain ability or heal at that moment instead, you have to wait for the queue of previously pressed ability to happen first before you can do the ability you want.
Despite having some server and lagging issues at launch, Diablo IVis a stunning sequel with near perfect endgame and progression design that makes it absolutely excruciating to put down. The combat, the loot game, and both the sights and sounds of this world are impressive enough to smooth over those rough edges. The game takes extra times refining things the series already did so well rather than giving it a more substantial overhaul, and that careful and reverent path has shaped this massive sequel into one of the most polished ARPGs ever created
Score: 9 of 10
Reviewed on PC