Having played many, many hours of the original Diablo 2, I thought this would be a great bite of nostalgia to sink my teeth into for some hours. Maybe complete the campaign, do a little bit of farming, why not? Having just done my first league of PoE and having tried Last Epoch recently, I was in the mood to play some more ARPG. So I gave it a shot.

I should not have given it a shot.

Diablo 2's atmosphere is still wonderfully grimdark and broody, with color in all the right places to make things pop, but the actual act of playing the game is a torture of the senses. Slow, plodding, unsatisfying to press buttons in, incredibly boring bosses even relative to the rest of the genre, the most flaccid endgame experience of all time... it goes on. Besides the graphics and its own namesake, I don't know how this game competes with its contemporaries in today's age.

Hell, I guess those things are what got ME to buy the remake, so egg on my face.

One day I will stop trying to revisit my old nostalgia games only to be disappointed. Maybe.

Perhaps I treated you too harshly......then again, maybe not.

This game never set right with me after the torment it had given me and I had thrown in the towel, but momma didn't raise no quitter and it's become a very bad habit of mine to let sleeping dogs lie. Once I started to sink my teeth into the great game that is Diablo 4 this damn game kept sinking into the back of my mind to remind me of the unfinished journey I had started quite a while ago. Needless to say, I had finally conquered the deadly Duriel and dove into the hellscape that laid before me in the coming acts all the way to the credits.

Honestly, I can't say much has changed from the judgments I made before and after acquiring the full experience, some of the same issues still stand. The grind is truly the worst I had experienced in a Diablo game. Once I hit level 20 every level after felt like it took centuries until I made it to the lord of Destruction where XP kind of got a much-needed boost. The environments, monsters, and pure aesthetic of this game are one to see for any fans of this style of game and the cutscenes were gorgeous! I loved these things about the game. Although playing as a solo assassin was tough, I was fortunate to make this nice build that carried me to the end. Although some end-game bosses were insanely tough including bullshit hellish dinosaurs toward the end that can stun-lock you. This game certainly has to have one of the worst systems when you die where you have to run all the way back to your body to get your gear back. The enemy AI is damn smart too and will camp your body until you get there just to beat your ass again. These demons got no mercy!!

Glad I stuck through it after failing constantly and came back and fought to an accomplishing finish to the game. Give it a shot if you enjoy the others, but be warned it's a relentless old-school hardcore beast to tame.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

This is not going to be a full review really as I only played Diablo 2: Resurrected for a few hours. I played the first Diablo a good few years ago and I think I remember just getting bored of it. I was hoping that the next game would feature some progression, which it does, just not enough to overcome how easily I got bored with it. The game’s remaster makes the game look brand new and fresh. I love the art style, animations and atmosphere. For me though, the game boils down to: click, click, click, click (to move), click, click, click (to fight) and the same thing over and over again. You do slowly upgrade your weapons and get stronger but the game is very repetitive to me. I never really felt involved in the battles, unless I was doing it wrong, all I was doing was clicking on enemies and hoping for the best. I have previous experience with world of Warcraft so certain elements of the game including how the HUD worked felt very familiar to me.

There’s something about a procedurally generated environment I just don’t like. In my opinion a good video game map is one that has been tailor made and crafted for the player’s experience. One that all people share the experience and you can look up online if you ever get stuck.

If I could change things to make the game better for me it would be: Free movement rather than point and click, save states or auto save, larger inventory, different moves assigned to different button, to name a few.

I threw in the towel after being defeated for the umpteenth time and having to make my way back to my body. When getting overcrowded in battles I couldn’t think fast enough to defend myself or run away, my life depleted away so quickly. I’m more of a fan of the type of levelling system that automatically increases your stats. As a first time player, having to manually decide which stats to increase felt like too much. I do own Diablo 3 and 4 that has just been released, if they are pretty much the same as 1 & 2 where you need to click for your character to move rather than free controls then it could be a good while before I try them out.

Well, I expected resurrected to be a remake, not a remaster. So I was pretty much disappointed with how old the game felt. Anyway there are a couple of wonderful great old games out there, but diablo II is just unhinged. Fuck that god forsaken hellish cube.

That said, it was pretty fun to play it on co-op. I was a necromancer and my friend Bolt was a Paladin. The last act was solid, the GC scenes were cool and I can see how the game was GREAT for when it launched, but it is pretty bad nowadays.

Lord of Destruction was the best part! Wayyy better than the base game. Gave it an extra half star just ‘cause of the DLC.

At it’s core, Diablo 2 feels like an attempt to just give people more Diablo 1. More dungeons, more quests, more locations, but still the same mouse driven hack and slash gameplay. That’s pretty standard for a sequel, I think, but what’s weird about Diablo 2 is how much it fits in with games released today. Basically, in addition to more of Diablo 1, they’ve also tried to heighten the experiences Diablo 1 gave.

For one, Loot is lootier, more disposable and more greed-inducing. Rather than a secondary thing in the first one, not all that different to how loot is handled in other RPGs of the time, loot is the primary driver besides quests here. There’s tons of little dungeons scattered throughout the game, each with a locked chest of randomized loot waiting at the end.

Multiplayer is also more competitive, with a ladder (at least in Resurrected, not sure about the original release), but also just feels more global. What comes out of this in particular isn’t a live service game, but you can feel what would become GaaS forming around you, like an addictive husk. In a way I think you can blame much of the issues the game industry faces today on Diablo 2, but I think you’d be overeager to do that. You can see where the shockwaves come from though, the focus on what Melos Han-Tani once called [“the treatmill”](https://melodicambient.neocities.org/posts/2020-12-20-Treatmills, or, Hades, Roguelites, and Gacha Games.html).

Honestly, beyond that, it’s a great 2001 PC dungeon crawler. I’m still not convinced by the mouse-driven controls (so much so that I got this on switch lol), but the art is gorgeous, the plot is interesting if a bit simple, and the whole experience is really like a roguelite with an enormous budget, and no permadeath lol. It’s got some bits that are beholden to the less desireable qualities of fantasy aesthetics of the time, particularly in the jungle and desert regions, but even those have enough wild successes to not call them anywhere close to a failure.

Basically, you should probably pirate this game.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.