Buy Diablo IV

Diablo is perhaps second only to Civilization as the franchise that has consumed the most hours of human life. There are plenty of similar titles, but Diablo (especially Diablo II) was the closest you could legally get to selling an addictive drug in video game form back in the '00s. Diablo III was no less addictive, but it's been a good long while since evil reared its ugly head. Diablo IV had a lot to live up to, and thankfully, the development team pulled it off. Diablo IV can best be described as "more Diablo," but sometimes, that's all a game needs to be.

Diablo IV tells a familiar story. A horrible demon has been summoned to the world of Sanctuary. In this case, it is Lilith, one of the original creators of the world, who has been summoned anew after being banished by the forces of light. You play as a warrior known as "The Wanderer," who is embroiled in the growing conflict between good and evil. In short, it's a Diablo story. You're basically getting the same thing you did the last five times you did this. Demons are evil, and they made the tragic mistake of being filled with precious loot.

Diablo IV does a good job of capturing the grim atmosphere (and occasional dark humor) the franchise is known for. The story never felt like a particularly strong aspect of the franchise, and Diablo IV doesn't change that. The cinematics are masterful as ever, and there's some cool world building, but the various heroes and villains of the world basically exist to give me just enough context for why I'm clicking on things until they die. They are unintrusive and occasionally amusing, and that's all it needs to be. We're not here to talk; we're here to unleash deadly magic spells on horrific creatures until a really cool item pops out.

To that end, Diablo IV hasn't changed much. It's a combination dungeon-crawler/mob combat game where the focus is on building your character as efficiently as possible so your variety of cool skills can burn through hordes of enemies. Some people dismissively refer to the game as a "clicker," but that isn't a negative. There's a simple, undeniable, and wholehearted satisfaction to building up your mage to the point that every spell has a chance to unleash seven different kinds of hell. Diablo hits the kind of power fantasy that is normally reserved for something like Dynasty Warriors.

The game offers five different playable classes: Barbarian, Druid, Necromancer, Rogue and Sorcerer. As you can imagine these tend to roughly translate to smashy, nature-y, skellie, sneaky and blasty. However, Diablo IV is extremely good at not forcing you into a specific role for your class. Instead, each class has a robust skill tree that you can easily adjust so you can determine how you want your role to play. You can experiment with different builds to make it easier to find something that really clicks for you.

A Barbarian can be customized into effectively being a walking danger zone who hurts enemies who attack and focuses on keeping itself alive. You can go "spin to win" and create a whirlwind build that buzzsaws through everything in your path. A Druid can become a close-range melee werewolf or evoke the power of the land to be a massive AoE spellcaster. Necromancers can focus on damage, debuffs or tanking. Some builds feel a little weak (and as of this writing, the devs did a pretty large nerf wave that may impact things), but when you find something that works for you, it tends to feel amazing.

Most of the game's changes to the franchise come from its "open world" changes, which focus around making the game feel more like an MMORPG than previous entries. The exploration area is large enough that you'll eventually need a horse to get around, and it's populated by various mobs, hidden quests, and the occasional world boss that's designed to encourage multiple players to join together and fight. The traditional Diablo dungeons are still instanced off. Describing it as an MMO isn't quite accurate, though. It doesn't feel like one, and the instances when you encounter other characters feel more like isolated chance than the fear that you're going to encounter 27 angry buzzsaw Barbarians chewing through everything.

I can't call this change a negative or positive. It lends some neat new aspects to traversing Diablo, which was never its strong point, but it still doesn't change much. Dungeons are more frequent but feel more basic. The quests designed to bring strangers together exist, but people will play multiplayer Diablo the exact same way that they always have: adventuring with friends in instanced dungeons. Thankfully, it doesn't hurt the gameplay, and any concerns about it becoming a MMORPG seem largely unfounded.

One of Diablo IV's biggest issues is that it starts off slowly. It can take a dozen or more hours to reach the point that your character feels cool and the loot starts feeling noteworthy. It's very likely that you're going to feel like the problem might be with your chosen class or the skills, when the more genuine answer is that the game expects you to put a lot of time into it before you get to the exciting parts. If this game weren't titled Diablo, people might not be willing to invest that time. Diablo IV could use a stronger start to make it easier to hop into the addictive parts.

And the game is certainly addictive. This is basically the only thing Diablo genuinely needs to do well. Is it fun to click on things to get loot to click on bigger things to get bigger loot?

Yes, absolutely.

Diablo IV's interwoven collection of mechanics, skills, loot and more come together almost perfectly. It takes some time to get going, but once it does, it's incredibly easy to see people losing hours and hours to it. It's a masterful combination of visual and gameplay feedback that makes it fun to blow up monsters for hours, despite the basic repetitive nature of the experience.

In that sense, Diablo IV is a case of, "If it ain't broke." It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel. For all of its shiny new concepts and ideas, it's still the same Diablo at heart, and it gives the same kind of lizard brain rush every time you find a new trinket that benefits your build or you smash down a particularly hardy foe. It's polished to a mirror sheen and is clearly the result of thousands of developer hours dedicated to figuring out the exact series of inputs that will make you want to sacrifice hours of your life at Lilith's dark altar.

The game does include some unfortunate predatory microtransaction stuff that you might expect from a big-name game these days. As of this writing, none of it seems to be "play to win," but there are extremely expensive cosmetics and a battlepass, both of which seem entirely cosmetic rather than anything that has a gameplay impact. In terms of microtransaction cosmetics, I think Diablo IV's are overpriced, and the fact that they seem to be locked to real money means a lot of players are going to ignore it. It'd be worse if there were gameplay bonuses, but the cosmetics make your Barbarian look slightly different, and it doesn't affect the game.

Diablo IV is probably the single best-looking loot-RPG game I've ever played. Sanctuary is a grim, gloomy, macabre land filled with horrible demons, decaying corpses, spikes, chains, and pretty much everything you'd find in a metal album. It's a better update of the Diablo aesthetic than Diablo III was, but sometimes, it can be too dark and difficult to see things. The animations in combat are cool, but the talking animations can be lackluster. Again, I'm playing Diablo to click on things, not listen to people talk! Fortunately, the voice acting is quite good. It all has a slightly campy atmosphere that works well for the game and fits the larger-than-life battle between gods and demons.

Diablo IV is an extremely good Diablo game, and that is all it needs to be. It doesn't change much, and it focuses on polishing what the franchise already did well. It's always difficult to tell how these kinds of games will develop; by the end of its life cycle, Diablo III was almost unrecognizable compared to its launch state. Barring some terrible missteps, Diablo IV has everything it needs to grasp your soul with its malevolent claws and eat up hours of your life. Newcomers or long-time fans alike should find it easy to pick up and play Diablo IV.

Score: 9.0/10