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The freezing and unabating snowstorm whips around the player as they trudge through the growing snow. Giant wolves, almost as tall as a man, are lurking just outside the lantern light before attacking with fangs and claws. The player stumbles into a small town, seeking respite from the storm - only to find it carries a dark and twisted secret that could lead to the end of the world. This is Diablo 4, and its bloody and dark-Gothic tale created by Blizzard is just beginning.

The isometric, top-down style of action roleplaying games has been used to great effect for a variety of games over the years in titles like Lost Ark, Planescape: Torment, Hades, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, and more. But for many gamers of the older generation, Diablo and Diablo 2 were some of the first games to cement the 2.5D style as a favorite genre for them. It was a unique blend of RPG and action combat that quickly gained notoriety among gamers. The tales it told were macabre and apocalyptic, with the fate of the world known as Sanctuary usually hanging in the balance. Users fought back hordes of demons, and sometimes angels, while learning about the greater and lesser evils that seemed to threaten the world constantly, and the fears instilled from learning about this world hold true in and throughout Diablo 4.

diablo 4 sorceress going to get slam dunked soon

With the first Diablo back in 1997, fans have long been enraptured with the tales of fighting monstrous evils woven by developer Blizzard. The game was originally envisioned by a company named Condor, but its name was changed to Blizzard North only nine months before the original Diablo came out. Published on PC by Blizzard Entertainment, the saga of the battle between Heaven and Hell has been gruesome and eerily dark since its inception, and Diablo 4 exceeds almost anything and everything experienced before it. Everything flows nicely, from the story to the graphics to the character design, each aspect of the game feels so perfectly at home in the world constantly under threat from the forces of dark and light.

The game begins with an introductory cutscene of the player astride their horse in a snowy landscape, but sharp-eyed users will quickly notice that their created character is actually in the cutscene as well, with every scar and wild hairdo prominently on display. It is the game’s first hint at Blizzard doing something big to help immerse the player deeper into the world of Sanctuary. Player-created characters appearing in cutscenes aren’t new in gaming, but it is new to see them displayed in the quality that only Blizzard can provide. The voice-acting for every main and side character is top-notch as well, further proving that Blizzard still makes some of the best movie-quality cutscenes found anywhere in gaming.

diablo 4 barbarian human enemies gonna die

Diablo 4 is also some of Blizzard's best story-telling to date. It’s entertaining enough to say that hopefully, the majority of players will get to experience it spoiler free as it weaves an extraordinary tale with the wandering player slowly but surely becoming the main focus. There are parts of grotesque violence, enough to make some players blanch as they’re forced to sit through it, but this is Diablo and blood and gore go hand-in-hand with most of its stories. This story starts with a very small focus, but gradually builds and then effectively ends while efficiently setting up the next stories that will inevitably be told. It’s also one of the longer, if not longest, campaign stories in any Diablo game to date. Players will be joined at various intervals by both main and side characters, but they are mostly just visually present and don't do much to help with combat. Some have fun audio queues when fighting or traveling with the player's character, to the point that users might be a little sad to see them depart to the next story beat.

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Players will have to come to terms with the fact the story being told is rather linear, and there aren’t really any choices that can drastically change the story in any way. Some will argue that in this day and age, giving players more of an opportunity to mess with the story's narrative would help them feel like they actually have an effect on the world. Blizzard could have made a larger branching style story but instead chose to send the player through the adventure they wanted to tell, allowing them to focus and tell a great tale from beginning to end. Users with no knowledge of previous Diablo lore might feel a little lost with all the name-dropping and callbacks to previous games, but it isn’t hard to pick up the nuances and general gist of the world’s history and enjoy what is just presented in Diablo 4.

diablo 4 sorceress large snake spell

Diablo 4’s sense of immersion is even greater when exploring the huge amount of side quests the game offers. These can start from various NPCs scattered throughout the lands and cities, or from a dropped item after a kill, but each one can be a gripping tale just by itself. The variety of stories told through these side missions is usually smaller and more focused, but some can grow into multiple-step missions that are memorable.

Outside the cutscenes, and regardless of if players choose to download the high-resolution texture pack offered when they download Diablo 4, the game itself looks gorgeous. If users have the appropriate specifications required for the high-resolution texture pack, it improves an already gorgeous game even more, though it might only be noticeable when zooming the camera in as far as possible. Flickering torches spread just enough light to illuminate dark corners of the dungeons; dark foreboding trees spread their branches around in an almost evil fashion; ground textures of dirt, sand, and grass look outstanding; and enemies sports designs straight out of a tormented and hellish landscape. Even the well-lit sections of mountain pathways or the beaches and tide pools along the coastline are well-crafted and gorgeous to look at.

diablo 4 druid stunned enemy dirt road

Lillith, the daughter of Mephisto and mother of Sanctuary, looks especially eye-catching this time around, creating such an intimidating form that it’s hard not to be impressed with her design. The improvement in enemy designs also includes some of the best-looking bosses seen in any Diablo game so far, and are a joy to fight and die to even at the highest difficulty. There are quite a few varieties of enemies found in the various areas as well, so players will enjoy coming across new ones as they progress or explore the entirety of Sanctuary. A graphical choice that may be an annoyance for some will be the light source seemingly attached to the front of the player’s character, causing them to cast a shadow behind them that comes from an invisible light source. It looks odd to not be able to see the source of the light emanating from the character but becomes less noticeable the longer one plays. There is also a neat day and night cycle that that changes the way a landscape looks, though it never gets dark enough to make stuff invisible.

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Diablo 4 also does a fantastic job of using changes in elevation to its advantage, something not every top-down ARPG can pull off effectively. Running or galloping over giant sand dunes, climbing cliff sides, or standing atop a hill looking down at enemies below your character, it is easy to see where a lot of the work since Diablo 3 has gone. Diablo Immortal had pieces of this idea, but Diablo 4 has almost perfected it. The elevation changes also allow Blizzard to break up quest steps without it intruding too deeply into the flow of the game, though there were a few missions that became a tad more tedious by simply having to travel up and down the same set of travel points repeatedly. While returning to locations is sometimes required, these moments are thankfully few and far between while progressing through the main campaign's stories.

diablo 4 necromancer trapped in bone werewolves and friends

Not to be outdone with just pretty backgrounds and static set pieces, character spells and animations have obviously had a lot of work and love put into them. An example of this could be when a player or enemy gets frozen, and the frozen entity is encased in icicles that point away from where the attack emanates, or after dying from a fire-based attack the corpse is consumed by flames, leaving a charred skeleton on the ground. These little touches add a lot to the immersion and feeling of being a powerful entity traveling through the world. Physical attacks are shown the same amount of love as well, with enemies being neatly cut in two on some larger attacks and body parts flying through the air and splattering blood on landing. Each skill in the skill tree has a use, with only a few seeming to be pointless.

Nonetheless, there will undoubtedly be players that can find a use for each one. Especially any that cause vulnerability, as it acts as a rather big way to improve a player's damage to the various monsters. There is a special joy in watching enemies get launched upwards and land hard as the result of an attack or spell, but something a few players will notice is how quickly the blood, gore, and bodies disappear after being struck down. Either due to Blizzard needing to get rid of static junk to ensure there is no framerate slow-down or a myriad of other possible technical reasons, it is hard to say, but it likely won’t be a dealbreaker for anyone despite its short length.

Blizzard is known for being capable of creating a vast array of different characters in a myriad of games, but Diablo 4’s character designs truly deserve their own praise. Choosing between Rogue, Necromancer, Barbarian, Druid, or Sorceress, has never been more difficult since they all feel so rewarding to play. The basic skill trees are on the smaller side when compared to some other ARPGs, but there are still plenty of choices. Pure casters, hybrid caster/melee, and strictly melee classes are all back as options this time around. Even though they’re missing the shenanigans of some previous classes, like the Diablo 3 Witchdoctor’s frogs and chicken spells, what is here is already very fun. Each class has a unique aspect to them, such as the Necromancers Book of the Dead that lets them choose abilities for their minions or buff themselves, or the Barbarian's ability to equip four total melee weapons at one time while also having an expertise menu that allows for individual skill customization. Each character is separated from the other will small touches like this, and these choices make picking a class legitimately difficult.

diablo 4 sorceress almost dark enemy talking

Something that most long-term Diablo players might find titillating is simply the number of things to do outside the story missions. Players capture the various strongholds scattered throughout Sanctuary, complete world-boss fights, explore and look for the Altars of Lillith, build up region renown, do dynamic and brief quests that sprout up throughout the different areas, and even delve into PVP. This list doesn’t even include activities that unlock after completing Diablo 4’s story, like Whispers of the Dead’s continually shifting missions, or what options become available after unlocking World Tier 3 and Tier 4, but needless to say, the scope of activities grows even larger. It will take a good long time until players can start to complain about having nothing to do. Even after finishing the story, there will likely be large sections of the map still left unexplored if users didn’t venture off the questing paths very far. More exploration is rarely a bad thing, especially in a game with finite edges.

Though there are a large variety of activities, players may find a certain sense of repetition that may begin to bother them, as the vast majority of quests and missions require mindless killing to complete. When killing high-value targets, gathering soul essence by killing specific monsters, killing enemies within a certain radius to charge crystals, killing enemies to obtain an item a player needs to return there might be a level of burnout. It is easy to repeatedly fall back on the thought that ‘this is Diablo, of course, it's mostly killing’, and it's true that this lore-filled world is a brutal and deadly place. But some may feel this sort of repetition tedious, though it's hard to imagine something else a player could do that wouldn’t affect their sense of immersion while playing.

diablo 4 necromancer nighttime ambush

Most players will definitely enjoy Blizzard’s decision to have the world scale upwards to the player's level. This means that after reaching the minimum level for an area, returning to it will allow users to find and grind for items that drop at appropriate levels for that character. There are certain sections of the map that are vastly more dangerous until reaching the recommended minimum level, which in turn makes exploration at low levels much more difficult. That gatekeeping is somewhat demurred by designing the lower level locations to be rather large areas themselves. If going through the story the first time, players are shepherded around the map easily enough, but if just blitzing through story missions, there will come a moment where some grinding or side quest completions will need to be done in order to not be immediately cut down when entering a higher level area.

This becomes really noticeable when taking advantage of one of Blizzard’s foremost decisions with Diablo 4: allowing new or already created characters the option to jump directly into the endgame after the main campaign story has been completed once. This means brand-new characters can begin their endgame grind from level 1 if the player wants to, and is definitely one of the best choices for the sequel. Blizzard has really opted to give players as much choice as possible with how they want to go about playing the game. And all of these choices are experienced before even discussing Diablo 4's crafting systems or the Paragon Board.

diablo 4 sorceress flamethrower spell in wood house

Crafting has received almost a complete overhaul since Diablo 3. Not only are players now able to pull aspects from legendary items and hold onto them to re-insert into new items, but inserting them into rare items will upgrade them into legendary items. This will help create a level of build crafting that has a tremendous amount of depth, and there are also a ton of different abilities and skills to be found on legendary items. The ability to 'level-up' a rare item into a legendary might help cut down on the spamming of the sell or deconstruction buttons, though players will need to continue doing both in order to get the materials to upgrade and buy armor if they so choose. The prices for armor and weapons did feel incredibly high in the review build of the game and prices also scale with the player's level.

The newly created Paragon Board is a build-crafters dream system. Starting at level 50 and earning a total of 220 points, players unlock a board full of tiles that are all interconnected and separate from the skill tree. The first (or beginner board) is full of common, magic, rare, and other nodes, each adding a small-to-slightly-larger boost for skills, spells, or stats. It may seem daunting at first, but Blizzard seems confident that players will know what direction they want to take their character in by the time they reach the Paragon Boards. The game strives for and hits the sweetest of spots when it comes to giving the players layers upon layers of options.

Each of these systems, from the different crafting systems to the Paragon Board, meld together so smoothly and efficiently, it’s actually kind of amazing to see it working together in-game. Each system feeds into the next one easily, and even though there may be some choice paralysis with so many options to pick between, the sheer variety of options available to players is just impressive to see in a Diablo game. There may be larger skill trees in other games, but the systems found here synergize so effortlessly that it really is hard to not be slightly impressed. Blizzard hopes by the time users reach the second Paragon Board, they will know and have chosen which direction they want to take their character.

diablo 4 sorceress ice crystal put out bear on fire

Blizzard has taken twenty years of game design lessons and put all of them into Diablo 4. The variety of things to do in the game and the plethora of build choices feel like they come from a company that has experienced the highest highs and lowest lows in game development and taken some of those hard-learned lessons to heart. There is a lot of love built into every aspect of Diablo 4, and users will find it in every system and corner of Sanctuary. With the first simultaneous release on PC and consoles in the series' history, Diablo players are finally getting back into the fight between Heaven and Hell, and they will more than likely still be fighting for many years to come.

diablo 4 box art
Diablo 4
$47 $70 Save $23

Diablo 4 is an action PRG developed by Blizzard Entertainment. It's the fourth mainline game in the franchise and lets players pick from 5 playable classes as they explore an open world Sanctuary in order to take down Lilith, while also completing quests, leveling up, and gaining better loot.

Franchise
Diablo
Platform(s)
PC , PS4 , PS5 , Xbox One , Xbox Series X , Xbox Series S
Released
June 6, 2023
Developer(s)
Blizzard
Publisher(s)
Blizzard
Genre(s)
Action RPG , Hack and Slash
How Long To Beat
27 Hours
Metascore
88
Platforms That Support Crossplay
PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One & Xbox Series X|S
Split Screen Orientation
N/A (Shared Screen)
Number of Players
1-2
PS Plus Availability
N/A
Local Co-Op Support
1-2 Players

Diablo 4 releases on June 6 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Game Rant was provided with a PC code for this review.