The original Diablo was a formative experience for me and a game I admire tremendously from a design perspective. I remember getting very excited when the sequel came out, but got stuck with a bad character build in Act II and subsequently gave it up. Seeing as it remains very popular I wanted to check it off on my bucket list of classic games, but unfortunately I was really disillusioned by the experience and kind of wish I hadn't gone to the trouble to revisit it.

Maybe it's sacrilege to say this, but I think this is a terrible sequel and almost like a Eurojank knock-off of Diablo. Like in the first game, you zip through procedural levels going through a mindnumbing repetitive loop of killing/looting a series of monsters and then town portaling back to the base. Sell, restock, repeat. But things get cranked up several notches too many. Everything is super smooth and zoned in on this core loop to the exclusion of anything else. Nothing leads to discomfort for the player. Vendors are strategically placed for minimum travel distance after the town portal. Hirelings smash enemies without you needing to lift a finger. If they die they can be resurrected within seconds at a negligible gold cost.

The game is dark and bloody, but the ambience of the first Diablo seems almost completely gone. NPCs are not fleshed out or humanized in any meaningful way. Quests are threadbare and often nonsensical, somehow becoming worse the more you progress in the game. The dialogue is basic madlib with the various triggers and game objects the player must interact with to progress ("This {Darkness} must be the work of {Claw Vipers}! Go to their {Nest} and kill them").

What seems to have preoccupied the designers are two equally odious pillars constituting the core gameplay loop: 1) a nested system of slot machines for random gear and upgrades that the player can collect, 2) a ridiculously over-engineered skill tree promising gameplay variety, but in reality offering only a few combinations that give the player a viable chance of completing the game.

The success of your character is defined almost exclusively by your build and your gear. As the gear is randomly generated through the aforementioned slot machines, the only skill involved lies in properly setting up your character. This is where the design runs into trouble. As I discovered in my first outing with the game, there is no real way for the player to predict what kind of abilities they will need later on. What works very well in one part of the game can suddenly drop off in usefulness without warning. Respeccing opportunities are exceedingly rare - only once per twenty-hour plus run - but the game does not inform you of this beforehand. Worse still, this chance is provided at the very start of the run, when you are the least likely to make good use of it. Spreading your skill points out to experiment with the various abilities does nothing but hurt you, the path to success is instead to cram almost all points into one thing.

This time I decided I didn't have time to screw around with a bad build and followed an online guide instead. As I followed the guide, I was disappointed by the sheer number of immersion-breaking things I had to do, things that would have been close to impossible for me to discover organically as a player taking the game's fiction and premise in good faith. The distribution of points was exceedingly lopsided and non-intuitive. I had to reload constantly to reset vendor stocks, farmed an early game boss for runes, had to make extensive use of the Horadric Cube (another slot machine) for item transmutations, the list goes on and on. Almost all skill points were fed into a single aura that was almost game-breakingly powerful - that is, until the final act, where it became almost useless.

The more I played, the more I came to hate the core systems of this game. Players are severely punished for experimentation and more or less forced to min-max with the aid of guides. Following the intuition you build up through normal gameplay never seems to lead you organically to good choices.

As I played through the game, the slot machine analogy stuck with me more and more. The soundscape is dominated by mid-range boosted sounds of rushing coins and gemstones. Minor dungeons end in seas of gold and purple sparkling chests. Bosses explode into fireworks of gold-colored loot. What I'm trying to say is that this game just feels like an online gambling app with a grimdark fantasy skin. As players mindlessly click-click-click their way through this procedural slop, are they really appreciably different from the rows of decrepit boomers in Vegas awaiting their final descent into oblivion?

In a world with the Soulsborne games and modern action rogue-likes, there is absolutely no need to play this. It's a bad sequel with nothing of what made the original Diablo good. It's more like the spiritual precursor to something like Raid: Shadow Legends - a hollow, insincere Skinner box that's just there to soak up your time without investing your actions with meaning or a vector for mental growth. Absolute detestable dreck. A cancer and a blight upon the history of games development. One star.

Recommended
Hardcore mode only
Gameplay 6/10
Music and sound 7/10
Screenplay 7/10
Technical 6/10

The only good thing about this is to relive some nostalgia, so if you never played Diablo 2 during its release years don't bother in 2023 because this is a 2000 game with a fresh coat of paint, it's gameplay aged horribly as nearly all loot-based games that came after Diablo 2 have significantly improved it's formula. I honestly feel fucking stupid for completing this game. I tried it with my gf, got to the tail end of Act II and we dropped it because Diablo 2's gameplay loop is just so boring, I eventually came back and finished Act IV before being done with it, Diablo is dead, I don't fucking care about the rest of the story, I actually super regret picking it back up and playing through the rest. You get swarmed by mobs 24/7 and spend 5-10 minutes killing each group of enemies (which consists of you holding left click with the occasional spell cast in-between), the main draw to Diablo 2 was always building your character, finding better gear etc. etc. Except that at normal difficulty (the one you always start on) you will change your gear once maybe 3-5 hours of play. I literally had the same gear for around 8 hours in Act I because the game refused to drop me some better gear from the 30-ish bosses, special and rare monsters that we fucking killed in that time. Every single health bar of nearly anything you go against is so bloated, you will be whacking at a boss for a solid 15 minutes at a time even if he does no damage to you, this can extend to upwards of 30 minutes if he is actually a threat and you need to portal out, restock on potions and such. The gameplay is also super sluggish, sometimes your character drinks a potion 1-2 seconds after your button press, sometimes he doesn't cast his abilities even tho im pressing the button to cast that ability, bosses and strong mobs can get stuck on stuff or stop responding to you being around which results in them getting mauled or shot to death (which still takes 10 minutes flat, with the boss not even fucking moving, amazing). All of the dungeons, environments, and maps are bland and empty of any meaningful life. This game is literally the only RPG looter hack and slash where I skipped every single optional area because I knew the loot from it WILL be garbage and there's no joy to be had from the game's extremely simple combat. At that point you have to ask yourself, does this game have anything else going for it? Well, the different classes and their skill trees are cool I guess, the cinematics look super dope and are fairly entertaining. The part that confuses me is that people say that Diablo 2 has a great plot. It fucking doesn't you liars, the plot is 'kill the demons because they are evil', it's almost as simple as it can get, the presentation is great, character designs and key locations look cool, but they all deliver very predictable, run-of-the-mill dialogue and story.

DNF

I picked it up because of my interest in trying a diablo game, 2 was the most recommended and resurrected is almost unanimously agreed on as the definitive way to play 2.

Yeah they remade the graphics to 3D models, but it feels uncanny due to multiple reasons.
One of them is that the new textures combined with 3D lighting decreases readability, not by much but dropped loot is the most affected by this. There's also performance hiccups that seem unjustified tbh, my rig is a bit dated but not enough to stutter in this game, but honestly this issue with other clues like the bloated game size gives off the impression that D2R isn't optimized or compressed well enough to justify this performance.

I recapped 1's plot to try and get invested in 2, but 2's plot seems more inconsequential, meaning no narrative incentive to keep going.

The game's loop was entertaining for the first few hours but exceeding double-digit hours it starts to strain, there's odd difficulty spikes, and some classes are affected way more by it. Side note: Blizzard killed off the capability to set up private servers because of a shitty excuse, so screw them.

It might be ok if you're playing on the switch, but dedicating free time to burn through it is not an attractive idea at all unless you already know what awaits you.

To be honest, and I have the feeling I'll be crucified for this: I don't understand the love Diablo 2 has garnered over the years. The Diablo series managed to co-opt and narrow the term “ARPG” to mean an isometric, point-and-click game through its sheer popularity, and over twenty years later Diablo 2 is still considered the ARPG among many gamers. Blizzard gave Diablo 2 quite the tune up with Diablo II: Resurrected, but is the game still a “masterpiece” with a new paint job? TL;DR at end.

I got D2:R because I played Diablo IV's beta as a necromancer and enjoyed that a good bit. Necromancers are rarely offered as an option, so it felt fresh summoning an army out of recently-slain corpses. I figured D4's launch would suck (nailed it, though you don't have to be Nostradamus to know Blizzard has a failure streak to maintain) and I didn't want to pay $70 to wait for a game to be good. So I got D2:R (and 3, on sale as a combo) as I figured, “When people say “Diablo”, they mean Diablo 2. It's gotta be good.”
So, is it?
To sum up my thoughts: kind of, not really. Many games are important, defining moments of the medium and easily cement their place in history; the harder part is still remaining good – or even playable – years later. With the press of the 'G' key, the game immediately shifts over to the original audio/visuals and good lord, have things improved. More remasters need to offer this, if for nothing other than the five seconds you'll spend in the old graphics to know you were wise to buy the remaster.
I'd say Blizzard was able to breathe a lot of life into Diablo 2 thanks to hard work on the visuals, but it still plays like a very old game and I fail to see why this is considered one of the greats when most of it is a bland and repetitive snore. I'm pretty sure the only reason I had fun at all was because I played with a friend, but every game is improved with friends, so that's hardly a "pro" to me. Alone, D2:R is almost dreadful.

The story has excellently rendered cutscenes accompanying each of its five Acts, but you'll never care about what's going on. Diablo was an asshole but someone killed him, oh wait he's coming back to life, kill him again. That's the game. The world is a few varied landscapes depending on the Act but there's nothing to learn about it except through maybe “gossip” dialogue options of NPCs. That's fine for me: I don't need to know more, they already lost me and they're sure to lose you, too.

The visuals all look good with great textures and the animations clearly kept the “jerking” look of yore intentionally; all very solid. Again, you can go back and look at the old textures and sounds with one button press, then right back to the Resurrected look when you realize how awful that was.
The UI is pretty terrible and probably my least favorite part of the game's experience. Only two buttons are shown, your left and right mouse clicks, and you can look through a clunky menu or use the F-row of keys to swap between abilities. 'W' can be pressed to switch weapons instantly to a second set, which can have its own presets. I don't think there's any denying that this feels bizarrely limited and stiff to navigate. For some reason, the controller support is quite good, where they bump that number from two visible inputs to five, and you can hold a trigger down to see five more! This is huge!... but since I prefer playing on a mouse and keyboard, I'm stuck with the clunky shit, memorizing what each key from F1 through F8 does and whether its assigned to M1 or M2. Very disappointing. At least key remapping works well?

ARPGs, as now-defined by Diablo, never interested me much. I think they're pretty boring. Your abilities rarely change and while boss fights may be exciting changes of pace, the game is almost always going to be a grind. By design you're supposed to walk into a room and, through basically muscle memory, wipe the whole place out, probably without opening your eyes. You will then do this several hundred times with little to no variety. Because your inputs are so miserable, having to actually swap between abilities on the fly is a nuisance and the developers seem to know this, so it's walk in, slaughter, move on.
To overly simplify, as I see it, there's really only two styles of gameplay: direct and summoners. Barbarians, Amazons, etc. are direct: they'll attack each enemy directly with their melee or ranged weapon and aside from maybe your slave-- I mean “hired help”, you're doing all the damage on your own. Necromancers and druids are summoners: they spawn an army to do their bidding for them and are largely managerial, making sure their wolves or their skeletons are full in number. Occasionally, they chip in with melee or ranged attacks, too, but their power comes from their numbers.
Summoners are insanely strong. I played as a necromancer while my buddy played as a druid, and together we just ran through most of this game while our combined armies tore shit up. This made the game pretty boring, honestly. Only Diablo and his brother, Baal, forced us to actually try and play differently. Two boss fights across god knows how many hours, that's it. Most of this game played itself for us.
Direct fighters are laborious. I've played a few hours as an Amazon, and while it's nice to actually have a direct role in the death of my enemies, now it's all on me. Everything has slowed way down, and since I've beaten the game as a necromancer, I know exactly how much more I have to go and it seems like quite the painful endeavor without someone else there acting as a summoner. It's less “boring”, I suppose, but not in a very good way. I doubt I'll finish as my Amazon.

You ever have a friend recommend you a TV show with the addendum, “Oh, the first season sucks, you gotta get through it because the second is where it gets good!”? You're probably not watching that show, right? People do that with games, too, of course: “Final Fantasy XIII gets good twenty/thirty hours in.” Diablo 2 is the first time I've ever seen a game really start to get good only after you've beaten the entire thing and can go through again on Nightmare difficulty.
Once beaten, you can just start the whole thing over again immediately as your same character. You keep all your gear and whatever is in your storage box. In the starting zone for the second time, my buddy and I finally started getting good loot. Maybe it was because we didn't play as Ladder characters, but we rarely ever saw yellow gear on Normal, it was now on Nightmare that we finally got a bit more of a challenge (as summoners, mind you) and loot to accompany the added trouble.

I have the ball rolling on that slightly better Nightmare playthrough, but I'm not sure I'll finish. I feel comfortable reviewing the game here. Finishing that Amazon's playthrough is even less likely. How can I possibly recommend a game to someone when it takes an entire playthrough to start feeling something from it? Most of my first playthrough felt like I was atrophying and the game ran on autopilot.
Maybe the real Diablo was the sheer number of times we had to teleport back to base to sell all of our junk along the way.

TL;DR This game isn't very fun to me, regardless of your class's play style. I like the variety offered (necromancers, hell yeah), but really it boils down to just two styles and they both have issues. As far as “classics you need to try” go, this isn't one of them.
Also, it has been two years and yet if you don't cap your frame rate in the settings, D2:R will try to set your computer on fire. Why hasn't Blizzard patched this? Other than attempting to melt your hardware, this is a pretty good remaster of a boring game.

Benim yaşlarımda olanlar muhakkak çocukluğunda Diablo ismini en az bir kere duymuştur. İsmini duymak ne söz, yaşça büyüklerimizden beylik beylik Diablo ve Blizzard övgüleri ile gözümüz en az bir kere boyanmıştır. Diablo için anasını kesenler mi dersiniz, Blizzarddan babası çıksa yiyecek olanlar mı neleer neler. Çocukluğumda bir pc sahibi olmadığım ve tüm oyunlarımı zavallı modchipli eski bir PS2 ile oynadığım için resmen koca bir çocukluk bu laflar yüzünde Diablonun hayalini kurmakla geçti(oysa baya şanslıymışım) Eee neymiş bu Diablo denen oyun. Diablo tüm oyun boyunca koridorlardan koridorlara dolanıp durduğunuz, oldukları yerde duran mobları kesip biçtiğiniz, karşılığında ise daha güçlü silah ve ekipman topladığınız akılsız bir loot oyunu. Hikayesi ise... ne yalan söyleyeyim beş bölümden oluşan oyunun ilk üç parçasını oynadım. Hikaye namına duyacağınız tek şey: Kahramanımız yeni bir bölgeye gider, köyün ağası size köye musallat olmuş kötülüğü anlatır, siz de bölümün sonunda büyük kötüyü yenersiniz ve bir sonraki bölgeye geçilir. Oyunda anlatılanlar büyük oranda bundan ibaret, Ha Diablo sıkıcı bir oyun mudur derseniz aslında pek sayılmaz, oyun döngüsü öyle bir ince ayar çekilerek hazırlanmış ki, tam sıkılıp bunalacağınız anda size yeni ve daha güçlü ekipmanlar verip bir sonraki objektife yönlendiriyor, bu sayede bayılmasanız da bir parça bağımlısı haline getirmeyi başarıyor. Müzikler ve atmosferini de başarılı buldum, ayrıca pre-rendered ara sahneler de fevkaladeler. Diyeceğim odur ki Diablo sizin için o hayallerinizi kurduğunuz büyük RPG başyapıtı olmayabilir, aksine büyük hayal kırıklıkları yaşatabilir, fakat aradığınız basit bir looter aksiyon oyunu ise deneyebilirsiniz.

This might be a very controversial opinion but I think Diablo II aged just a tiny bit better than the original, and I started to even hate the gameplay of it by the end.

Diablo II was the game that pretty much streamlined what an ARPG can be, and upgraded upon everything from the original. It has a wide class selection, big maps, many monsters and demons to slay, good loot and the list goes on.
However, every change was mostly good for it's own time, and today, the game itself is just tedious to play, starting from the very limited customization (you can build your character differently, but some builds just not worth it at all), the geniusly boring dungeon designs and the bosses that are just so damn powerful, that if you do not build your character in a certain way, they will kill you in seconds.

This results in a brutal frustration where the player tries to enjoy the gameplay loop, but the game constantly reminds the player of it's age, despite the remastered graphics, and becomes this nightmare to enjoy. The remaster is gorgeous, it looks really good, but it is literally the old game, with a new coat of paint.

This game needed a remake, not a remaster, as the foundations are great, and for it's time, it was a masterpiece, but you cannot enjoy it today without nostalgia goggles, and sadly, I do not have those when I need them the most.

I've played so many games inspired by Diablo so coming back to the game that invoked those comparisons was partially an archeological exploration and mostly an enjoyable experience. I hadn't realized just how faithful Diablo II: Resurrected is to the original game, so wrestling with some of the dated game design elements did initially put me off from the game, but by the end of the campaign I found myself quite enjoying the loop. Diablo II felt so good whenever I was exploring a new area or dungeon, with a solid sense of genuine discovery. It does lack several modern day conveniences, like the ability to respec your character more than a single time (meaning I was stuck with some bad choices I made early on). This hindered my ability to experiment more with my build which certainly felt constricting. As dated as this game is, it definitely still holds up and I can see why it's been such an inspiration to so many games.

I have fond memories of playing the original "Diablo II" at my friend's house in elementary school, as my parents wouldn't buy me the game. We would replay act one over and over again, and we'd always get stuck in act two. Years later, I got my hands on "Diablo III" on PS3, but it quickly lost its luster for me. It just felt like it wasn’t worth the limited time I had to play on consoles. However, when I saw this “Diablo II” remake available for Switch, I knew I had to give it a chance.

Even though I don’t think I got any of the plot, the gameplay loop is so addictively simple that I started from killing time with it to desperately finding time to play with it.

While the graphics are vastly improved, the tiny character models make it difficult to fully appreciate the visual overhaul on mobile consoles. Despite that, I still enjoyed playing as a Necromancer (as usual). Even though I had to spam potions in the late chapters, I found the game to be relatively easy to complete, with the exception of Baal and Duriel.

The game's mechanics and progression system have aged well, and the new quality-of-life features make it more accessible to newcomers.

“Diablo 2” holds up very well! I almost rage quite it in the beginning, but I learned the ropes again from playing this a ton as a kid and once it all clicked I was off to the races. The game itself does feel old and somewhat archaic, but in a good way. It reminds me of how games used to be way harder than they are these days and they also used to have unlimited replay-ability. There’s a reason people are still playing Diablo 2 today, the systems in place are even deeper than most games of its genre. This remake also looks gorgeous top to bottom. Easy recommend.