Diablo IV: The Grayest Game I Ever Played

And not just the colors, either.

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It took me six weeks since the release of Diablo IV to finish the campaign. I had several friends who finished it opening weekend. Why did it take me so long? There are easy enough excuses: server disconnects, power outages (I had one last a week), I went on vacation, a death in the family… but the truth is that I wasn’t particularly interested in finishing because Diablo IV, for the vast majority of the campaign, is a very bland game.

Before I go further, let me say that I will be very critical of the game, but it is not all bad; it does have redeeming qualities, but even these just aren’t very good. It’s… well, bland. Chances are if you’re already into Diablo, you have already purchased the game, ground up your level, and moved into the endgame stage or are maxing a seasonal character and don’t care about any of these criticisms. For people who are more casual and for whom 40 hours is a lot to drop into a game, my short opinion is to wait, probably until the first expansion. That’s because the first 40 hours, the campaign, are a slog.

Other people seem to like the visual style, but I find the endless stretches of greys and desaturated blues and yellows to be horribly monotonous. Even the blood looks drab and mute. They made a big deal about going with a “darker” tone than Diablo III, and I guess that means “Cannibal Corpse Cover without any colors.” It’s certainly grotesque, but the horror has little impact. The problem is that without any color, no details stand out, even when the art is quite baroque. It’s like looking at a wood floor: you see a brown floor, the composite of all the planks, not a complex pattern of wood grain. Each area in Diablo IV blends with the last since the palette changes are so subtle. If the game were in black and white, almost nothing would be lost. The ground is grey. The buildings are grey. The water is grey. The snow is grey. Hell is grey. The monsters are all grey. Even the grass is grey. It’s the greyest game I’ve ever seen.

None of the designs are bad per se, but they aren’t particularly interesting, either, even aside from the lack of color. You get “Gothic” fantasy which means it aesthetically apes everything from the middle ages, and in this case, is more Romanesque than Gothic. The few details you get in the religious direction are more Eastern than Western, more Orthodox than Catholic. I liked that, but while, like the entire art direction, it isn’t bad, it’s lacking substance. The religious symbolism is a copy of the Christian without any understanding of it, an aesthetic that points to nothing. Contrast this with Castlevania, which uses the same aesthetic language but with explicitly Christian heroes. There are icons, suns, and crosses in Diablo, but they are disconnected from the Christian meanings of such objects.

The assets being used are also highly repetitive. This wasn’t a major problem in previous games because the assets were only repeated within a given level or in the remixed rifts, and each act had its own aesthetic language. In Diablo IV, the assets are repeated all over the map and in every “dungeon,” so everything gets turned to grey mush in memory. Every dungeon looks like a Diablo III cave level. Every castle has the same bricks and crosses, the same doors, and there are many of them. There are a dozen towns with very little to separate them from one another visually. The villages are just spawn points with some shops, a convenience for players and not an extension of the “world” because Diablo IV has no coherent “world.” It’s an expanse of procedurally generated goop that feels like an endless, meaningless waste. And unlike previous games, in which replays of areas yield new arrangements to explore, the world of Diablo IV is set and shared among players, like an MMO, always the same.

The absolutely insane hordes of mobs don’t help with the aesthetic value. You quickly lose track of any sort of individuality regarding any of the monster designs, and things quickly become a large, seething grey mass of… whatever is chasing your character around. Even the spell effects seem to lack vivid color, making it difficult and annoying to keep track of everything, but that doesn’t matter too much because most of the game is easy enough that you don’t need to pay attention to champion affixes. In fact, you don’t really need to interact with the monsters at all. All open-world content is skippable, and as I found, it is more efficient to ignore every enemy between quest locations, just like in Diablo III. The world is full of “quests,” but none of them seem to be fun or rewarding, even the campaign quests. You get, at best, random pieces of loot that are at your level with random stats that are most often useless. The mobs are familiar extra-crisp versions of what we’ve seen in previous games: skeletons, zombies, ghosts, goat-men, wolves, and various grotesque demons, and each type repeats over and over as you run through the grey world.

I played a sorcerer for my initial experiments, which is exactly like the Diablo III wizard, down the skills, even (I’ve also been told it is the worst class). The glass cannon did give me some challenges, and I died a few times to bosses, but most of the time, I never felt like I was in any real danger. By level 25, I figured out I could just drop fire hydras and run in circles and kill 90% of everything, or, like I said, just run away to save time. Most boss fights were about not standing in stuff on the ground and avoiding moving spells. Only one (in an optional castle) gave me any trouble, and I think that was because I was level 10 and lacked the spells to deal with him. Most of the times I got close to death were because I was somehow crowd-controlled, physically unable to move my character out of whatever cloud or puddle was killing me. I never really felt challenged, even if the game didn’t feel “easy.”

For the seasonal content, I played a druid, which felt unique compared to the sorcerer, and that is what I used to finish the campaign. Again, by level 25 I had all the skills unlocked and was able to try out different builds, eventually finding one that I finished the game with at level 37. I encountered a few challenges with the druid, mostly because of the strange level scaling at play, which I was not sure was a seasonal change or not. At first, all the content leveled with me, then it jumped suddenly to level 35 when I was level 25. That made it slightly harder, but I only felt really challenged when I reached the final act, in hell, where all the mobs were level 45 and crammed with elites, and I was still in the 30s. This was when I really started having fun with the gameplay—when I finally felt like I was playing a Diablo game. I realized, with surprise, that I was having fun, and it only took six weeks to get there – far too long.

The camera is way too zoomed in. This is far worse than the previous games, and it makes many parts of the games incredibly annoying, since it’s easy for all the aggro’d mobs to be off the screen where you can’t react to them. Even in boss fights, half my time is spent with the boss OFF screen. Dodge once and suddenly you can’t see what you’re supposed to be fighting. I can imagine this being a real problem at higher difficulty levels or when playing hardcore when you get punished for not reacting to something you literally cannot see. More to the point: why design a bunch environments just to not show them to the player? It’s not like the player’s gear is interesting to look at; all the costume designs are, like the environments, a wash of detail that is utterly forgettable. Someone in my livestream chat suggested the close camera was to sell cosmetics, or to allow the game to run on consoles, because I can’t see a reason for it, given the encounter design.

The loot system for the first part of the game is terrible, but that’s par for the course. It’s a close copy of the gear system for Diablo III, which doesn’t get interesting until you are at a high level rocking full sets and legendaries that can alter your playing style in unique ways. Like that game, the gear system boils down to putting on whatever piece has higher numbers. Occasionally you get a piece that gives you a skill point in some spell (that maybe you use, maybe not), but that doesn’t alter gameplay or make your character feel more powerful at all. It’s just a tiny boost in a single (potential) area of your character. I noticed this with lots of gear of the yellow and blue variety. Rather than containing unique effects like legendaries or having understandable stats like in WoW or previous games, the items are full of conditional boosts, like “reduces damage while you don’t have control of your character,” “Critical strike chance against injured enemies,” or “Life regeneration while not damaged recently.” The affixes are so situational and random that it’s not really worth thinking about the gear. Just change out your armor when you see green numbers, and you’re good. I also didn’t see many unique effects on legendaries (like, for example Diablo III’s “Blind Faith” helm), but instead powerful boosts to class skills.

There is also the issue of scaling which I should return to; the way the world scales to your level makes it so challenges continually decrease as you get gear and skills. The game starts easy, gets slightly challenging, then gets easy again, then gets hard if you don’t do the boring side content and force your way through the campaign like I did. The world is full of sidequests, but these don’t do much for the player since even a reward such as experience is moot when the game is scaled to your level.  I don’t think scaling is much of an issue, and it will probably be a non-issue at max level, again like Diablo III, but locking the game difficulty at 2 and NOT giving a harder option (with more rewards like EXP and more gear), then having the campaign suddenly jump up the monster levels was a mistake. The level 2 world is a slow, unrewarding chore to play through, even when avoiding all the pointless events and sidequests. Diablo III at least had me explore new environments as I went through the story.

Speaking of Diablo III, the new game is a functional copy of Diablo III with ultra-resolution (very grey) graphics and an open world. The idea that this game is somehow different seems a strange cope. Sorcerer is a nearly 1:1 copy of the wizard from Diablo III. The skill progression is exactly like Diablo III, only put visually into a “talent tree” that obscures the reality of a limited skill set with chosen buff effects. Take a look at the older game and how you assign skills and the additional effects on them, and you’ll see my point. I guess the trick worked, though, since people think it's different or exciting. They did the same thing with paragon points, putting them into a “tree” instead of a set of stats, etc. and none of them amount to much. I didn’t hate the Diablo III skills, mind you, but this implementation is not new or interesting, and I think is executed worse than Diablo III, or at least where Diablo III ended up after all the patches and expansions (like getting rid of monster power and the absurd real-money auction house). Diablo III, though gives a much better experience overall, especially in the aesthetics department. The style wasn’t to everybody’s taste, but at least it HAD style, and each area looked different from the others. Diablo IV monsters are just Diablo III monsters, but without color. The zones… well, enough said.

The music was good. I enjoyed it when it wasn’t drowned out by 100 demons screaming at me. It creates a great mood between encounters and adds to the overall atmosphere. A definite strong point.

Aesthetic values aside, the game looks great and runs well, even at 4k. It’s very crisp, and the characters are expressive and realistic. There is little to no slowdown, even when the screen is packed with monsters and magic. The only issue is noticing things like grass clipping through other objects when the camera is zoomed in. Diablo IV also runs on the Steam Deck, which is a big plus. Controller support works out of the box on PC, and I think the game is more fun and relaxing that way. I enjoyed Diablo III on console more than on PC, partly because of the controller and partly because of the couch co-op experience. I bought D4 on PC, though, so I can’t speak to the current implementation of couch co-op. I imagine the zoomed-in camera would make it more difficult than the previous title, but you’ll have to let me know.

The big elephant in the room is online connectivity, as in, the game is difficult to connect to because servers are frequently down. I had more server connection issues with Diablo IV than any game I’ve ever played. Some hiccups are to be expected—this is Blizzard, and it’s a popular, new game—but the amount of time I wanted to play and was able to was less than half the times I logged on to play in the first month. It’s abysmal; I even had issues on a Saturday afternoon when I saw that all my other friends were in the game, a full month after the game came out. Disconnects were punishing at launch. I would get kicked during a dungeon boss and log back in to find myself in town, forced to run all the way back to where I was and re-do everything.

The “always on” nature of Diablo IV would be more pardonable if it delivered anything of value to the game experience. Turning Diablo, an action RPG, into an MMO-lite-lite where lag can kill you is a bizarre choice, especially considering the MMO approach brings features nobody asked for. A persistent, shared world where you must team up to meet special challenges makes sense in World of Warcraft. Here, like in Diablo Immortal, it amounts to seeing names above random characters that you never have a reason to interact with. The world itself doesn’t fit with the style. It feels procedurally generated, not like a real place or an environment crafted with intent by a human being for the purpose of MMO gameplay. Azeroth feels like an abstraction of a real place; Sanctuary feels like a random mash of landscape tiles. And unlike previous games, this sanctuary is always the same. It’s the worst of both worlds: random worlds and no replayability in terms of exploration.

I had a two-week vacation shortly after launch, and while the game ran smoothly on the Steam Deck, it apparently required better internet than what I had at the Airbnb or hotel. I would get disconnected, and every time that happened, I would lose at least a half hour of campaign progress. However, even when I was sure the internet was solid, I found myself playing Final Fantasy XV because, despite its flaws, it was a far more engaging experience overall than Diablo IV. I wasn’t excited to play the shiny new Blizzard game. I couldn’t be bothered. That’s an extremely rare feeling for me.

Diablo IV is not a trash heap. Despite my criticisms, there is fun to be had, even if its best moments are interspersed with long stretches of boring garbage. However, it is a game that I realized, due to its online-only nature, doesn’t fit well into my life. The Steam Deck is a great piece of hardware, and part of that greatness when I’m traveling is that I can play a game like Final Fantasy XV, put the console to sleep, then wake it up when I have some more free time and hop right back to where I was with no delay. I can’t do that with Diablo IV. I have to be somewhere where I have at least 20-30 minutes to play without interruption because if I need to step away or put down the console, or if the internet has a slight hiccup, I have to do everything I just did all over again, and most of the game feels like a chore. After a few such occasions, my tendency was to choose something else to play. Nobody likes to do their chores twice.

This was also true at home. Diablo IV is a game I can only play when my kids are asleep because I have glass doors on my office, and the imagery is not kid-appropriate. Whenever I have that time, I tend to choose Final Fantasy XVI. It’s a much more fun experience and also one I can pause and put down if a child wakes up and needs me. In terms of time preference, Diablo IV just always loses. There’s far too much friction to playing the game and accessing the parts I’m interested in rather than the annoying parts I have to get through to progress. I feel like any time I want to play, there is a high chance my time will be wasted. I never felt that way with earlier versions of the game, even Diablo III, and I that game I played mostly AFTER I had children.

Seasons are back in Diablo IV, and while I enjoyed them in Diablo III, the weakness of the quests and the boring open world makes me want to quit while I’m ahead. I finished the campaign, but I still have to level up to get to endgame. But what is the endgame? Endless grinding for random gear. I guess that appeals to some people (I certainly liked farming high-level gear in Diablo III), but I’m getting old. The prospect of spending dozens of hours on what is (likely) a very familiar experience with no exit ramp when compared to a novel experience in another game with a defined destination is not very appealing. I could do one Diablo IV season, then do it again every 3 months, or I could just play different games. Seasons definitely pique that fear of missing out, but what else would I miss out on by grinding?

But what about the story?

Like the aesthetics and gameplay, it is a letdown, and I can give a few reasons why from my perspective as an author and as a person who has studied the art of storytelling and specialized in communicating those lessons. Before I begin, remember that with most games, the point of the story is not the story per se, it is a means by which the player is shuffled through the various set pieces of the game and introduced to its mechanics. Modern Diablo players also, in my experience, care nothing about the story, at least since Diablo II, and would choose to skip it and go straight to the endgame grind if they could. Nevertheless, Diablo IV has the worst story of the series, both in execution and, unfortunately, in concept.

The story of Diablo IV is, like the aesthetics, a manneristic practice that points to nothing. From long conversations that reveal nothing to a plot that goes nowhere, Diablo IV is full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Let’s talk about the setting first because this is arguably the biggest problem with the story, and its weaknesses will persist long after the player moves into the endgame. The writers just don’t have a good grasp on what Sanctuary is or what they are trying to tell the audience about it. Like the aesthetic design, it wears Christianity like a rubber mask while understanding nothing about it beyond post-protestant pop culture tropes about the church.

In fact, Sanctuary itself isn’t a reflection of Medieval Christianity at all but of a religion long perished: Manniqueism. In it, there is an eternal conflict between light and dark, good and evil, heaven and hell, and the earth is positioned between these extremes, a thing arising out of the conflict, like Ymir in Ginnungagap. In this sense, it is also somewhat Gnostic in that the world is created in secret (in this case by a pair of demiurges: Lilith and Inarius) and is an imperfect, or even bad, creation. There is no God (or gods) of Sanctuary; there are merely the angels and the demons, a dichotomy lifted from Christian tradition but severed from its mythological origins as well as its meaning and shoved into a dualistic framework. People pray… but there is no god to pray to, and the story spends all its capital hammering home this fact. There is no meaning to the eternal conflict, it simply is, which is the point of the world of Sanctuary.

There is little moral distinction between the heavens and hells of Diablo IV. The angels can be sinners, and the demons (like Lilith) are capable of creation. The angels do not love or care for humans but only conflict with the demons and their own perceived holiness. Inarius (an angel), who created the world with Lilith (a demon), murders his own son. Most of the good guys in the game agree that Inarius is an asshole. He is an angel but is also a cult leader, ascribing to himself powers that he knows he does not have, telling lies to gain attention, obsessed not with his followers’ salvation (which he lies about) but with returning to heaven himself, even if he has to destroy the world to do it. He’s an inversion of the Christ figure on every level. Lilith, similarly, is like a sick mockery of Theotokos, a “mother” of sin and lust rather than of immaculate purity. She leads her followers not to God, but to hell.

“The Cathedral,” a twisted pantomime of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions that created European civilization, is obsessed with penance (which is always expressed as punishment or physical suffering), but to no certain end. Everything about the church is framed in an extreme, almost ironic fashion, from the “Knights Penitent” to the barely present conflict with the naturalistic druids, a trope as old as modernity. It’s a caricature of the medieval as if Monty Python were a historical source, with its dirty filth-piling peasants, rampant plague, and monks that bash themselves in the face. The entire cosmology of the universe is uncertain, a mish-mash of ideas that allow for skeletons and monsters to rise up to be slain for the convenience of the player, a world where people pray but with no divinity to act, a world with a diversity of faiths, all leading through different paths that end in nothingness. The point of penance in the Christian tradition is to repair one’s relationship with God, to grow closer to Him, not because you deserve punishment and must suffer it in some legalistic exchange. There is no God of Sanctuary to grow close to and no cosmic law to transgress. The residents of Sanctuary don’t seem to go to any heaven or hell when they die. Christianity points to an afterlife; Inarius’s church points to… well, the fallen angel says you go to heaven, but it’s hard to see why you would want to. At best you get a vague reference to “the light,” but no real gods. A clever writer would have filled the void with other, more interesting ethical systems, but this is never pursued in Diablo. Instead all we get is mockery of sincere belief.

It’s all performative. Characters suffer horribly for religious reasons (operating giant armor filled with spikes, for instance)… which is no reason at all since there is no real religion in Santctuary. You see imitations of icons, but it’s clear the makers of the game don’t know what icons are used for. There are rites here and there, but for what purpose? They don’t seem to do anything. They certainly don’t harm demons! The names of the characters themselves are echoes of Christian traditions, from the many angels with -ael suffixes (taken from both the Bible and the book of Enoch) to the names of the demons themselves (Baal, for example, is a Levantine god from the Bible, while Mephisto is a demon lord from German Christian tradition). And of course, there is Lillith, Adam’s first wife, and mother of demons in apocryphal Jewish and Christian tradition in the Middle Ages. Lilith is a temptress, presenting the church as false, but the game already presents the church as false. She would reportedly be a liberator, but she does evil relentlessly.

Again, it just wears the familiar parts of Christianity like a bad Halloween costume—Forgivable if they had not leaned so heavily on these elements of the setting for this story entry and worked so hard to mock them.

The player, by opposing the demons, is merely making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one. The cosmology of Sanctuary works against the story and the point of the game, which is to kill demons. A simpler cosmology would have served much better, but earnest religion doesn’t jive with the modern nihilist mindset. Keep in mind many of these complaints also apply to former games in the series, but Diablo IV is particularly bad at confusing the Manichaean themes and obscuring them with elements that are clearly Christian. The only real point of Sanctuary’s cosmology in Diablo IV is to hammer home the point that humans are utterly alone, with nobody to help them or rule them to good ends. And really, there is no good. Tyreal, of course, is absent in this game.

The characters are, like everything else, a bore. There are many of them, and their relevance to the story is very low for each one. There are a few memorable characters apart from Lilith and Inarius, namely Donan and Lorath. Others, like Nyrelle and a witch whose name I cannot recall, are memorable only because it is confusing why they are present in the first place. They don’t seem to do anything throughout the game. Donan’s son shows up, and is immediately killed. The witch is being tattooed for a demonic ritual, then she’s off to be a witch again… but why does she matter? Part of this effect is the result of how the game is constructed. The campaign, rather than being strictly linear, is split up into a bunch of large campaign quest areas, particularly in the first few “acts”. The majority of the story feels like an unimportant side quest, chasing phantoms and moving nowhere, so all the characters feel like unimportant NPCs, the equivalent of random quest-givers in WoW, but with a few lines of spoken dialogue. They exist, as I said, to push the player through the various set pieces and nothing else. This wouldn’t be a major criticism if any of the set pieces were different from each other and if all the mechanics weren’t already experienced by level 25.

This split-up side quest approach to the campaign means that in terms of plot, the majority of the game is irrelevant, or at least fells so. Ostensibly you are tracking Lilith, but most campaign quests reveal nothing about her, her origins, her quest, or her motivations. They don’t move the story forward at all. There is no sense that the events you are experiencing are contributing in any way to the overall conflict (which is itself more uncertain as you play), which means they feel boring, like an intentional waste of your time because the writers couldn’t construct a real plot but needed the game to feel somehow bigger and more epic. If the cast of appearing and dying characters were at all compelling, it might help, but as it is, it feels like a series of disconnected mini-stories that only slightly expose the (rather poorly reasoned) setting.

This meandering, meaningless story style is unfortunate because the game begins with a compelling character introduction and evokes a hope of expansion of the mythology behind Sanctuary talked about in previous games. Lilith is summoned through an evil and disgusting ritual, and we are quickly told she is the creator of Sanctuary (With Inarius, it is reasoned), though we don’t know what she is pursuing or why. Most of the first 20 hours of the game are spent wandering around the map, meeting various people she has tempted to her cause (but we don’t find out her cause), and of course killing them, but not getting any closer to the conflict itself. Very few of the quests create what I would call a “story beat,” a moment where the direction of the plot shifts.

The conflict is uncertain, a mystery that (spoilers) is never solved. Even when confronting Lilith, the player is never permitted to discover just what she was trying to do the entire time. We get a hint at one point that she intends to absorb the power of Mephisto (whatever that means), but not to a certain end. Her believers seem to think she is saving sanctuary, but is that what she is trying to do? We simply don’t know. The worthy moral question of whether the ends justify the means is left to rot on the vine.

There are some good points to the writing I want to mention, and unfortunately, they too are borked by the bad execution of the story in total. There is present in the story a “prophecy” given by Rathma, son of Inarius and Lilith, that Inarius becomes obsessed with. In true classical fashion, the characters’ obsession with the prophecy brings it about, partly because they do not understand it. Rathma sees someone standing over him with the key to hell. It’s his mother, though his father was the one to kill him. Inarius believes he is destined to destroy hell (or Lilith) because Rathma saw a “blade of light piercing hatred’s heart.” It turns out to be Lilith piercing his heart with his own spear, because it is he that has adopted hatred, not Lilith. This sort of turnabout is straight out of Greek tragedy. Unfortunately, the prophecy gets virtually no emphasis in the story at all and has to be uncovered through a few fleeting pieces of dialogue. Personally, I would have led with the prophecy in the first act.

There are also issues that ought to be caught in an editing phase. For instance, right after a rather lengthy and spectacular cutscene with a showdown between the former lovers, Inarius and Lilith, the player character begins recounting events to the others that simply never happened, such as Lilith “toying” with Inarius and tearing his wings off. In the cutscene, she is almost killed and never has the upper hand until Inarius has a personal spiritual crisis, then she stabs her lover in the back. My guess is that the cinematic was completed after the script and they forgot to change the dialogue. There are a few things like that – characters mentioning things that were never introduced or stating things slightly incorrectly.

And I need to mention the ending. This is, by far, the worst ending to story I’ve seen come out of Blizzard, and played WoW during Shadowlands. After defeating Lilith, we learn nothing. A minor nuisance of a character who has no reason to be present at all, Nyrelle, disappears with a soulstone containing a prime evil, the biggest devils of the Diablo universe. She leaves a letter explaining precisely nothing but using many words, a microcosm of the entire story. This is either a cynical setup for future expansions (which you will pay for) or else another mystery box you will never get to open. It feels like the writers grew up watching Lost, and I mean that in the worst possible way.

All this is spent expounding a theme of nihilism, pretending to be Nietzschean primacy. Lilith berates humanity for choosing Tyrany (a contradiction in terms), declaring she is the giver of free will (an old Satanic trope), and they wasted it, even though the player just killed her of his own will and power, rejecting all religion. It’s just silly to me.

The braying of trumpets upon but a few notes.

Contrast all this with earlier games, where the narrative not only introduced important heroes but villains, where the hero traversed (in the second two games) large and diverse areas to stop the threat of a great evil. Diablo III’s story certainly feels much more epic than Diablo IV, but people didn’t like that story (the closest reason I’ve got was that they killed off Deckard Cain). I suppose my point is that modern Diablo fans don’t seem to care at all about the story. That’s fine, but we’re all forced to play through it for three dozen hours. Can’t a game with this budget just get out of the way and let the player have fun?

What about the future of the game?

It’s modern Blizzard, so forgive me if I am pessimistic. I’ve been to this rodeo too many times to expect that the company will suddenly stop looking at customers as addicts and deliver a good, and valuable, game experience. The game shipped with a cash store and battle pass, which means they are selling power, just not as directly as with Diablo III at launch. You can count on Blizzard to nickel and dime the customer more in the future. This is all the more reason to have an understandable and definable exit ramp for any game you play, but that’s exactly what things like battle passes are trying to stop. For me, I think, finishing the campaign is my exit. Maybe I’ll try the “capstone” dungeon. I don’t feel like grinding or paying for rewards just to have my damage numbers go up.

Gameplay – 4/10

Far too much time spent running past monsters in the open world to get to the boring, always the same dungeons, but the core diablo gameplay is still present.

Aesthetics and graphics – 4/10

The greyest game I’ve ever seen. Every area blends in with the next, with no real difference to be seen across the world. Many smaller details are very good, however.

Music and sound – 7/10

Nothing particularly memorable, but the music and soundscape helps tremendously with the mood.

Story – 3/10

Some good moments, but the whole plot feels like a mush of sidequests, with forgettable or annoying characters, an uncertain central conflict, glossed-over elements like the prophecy, and a shallow understanding of its own setting. Cross-purpose themes end up being a mockery of Christianity on one hand and nihilistic hand-waving on the other.

General effect – 4/10

A slog with good moments and some enjoyable boss fights. The core of Diablo is here, but not the fun.

Overall – 4/10

Despite being a technically competent game, it’s hard to be anything but bored and cynical with what is an underwhelming experience from a studio long past its prime, an IP custodian where all the talent left years ago.