Diablo IV Review (Patreon)

Is there such a thing as “too many goatmen?” Diablo IV dares to test the limits of goatmen technology.

After finishing the campaign I wanted to write something about Diablo IV, but I don’t know that I would call this a traditional review, primarily due to playing the game in a pre-release environment that wasn’t available quite long enough for me to really dig into the game’s post-campaign content. That’s obviously a major part of the overall Diablo IV experience. The game will also have some monetization stuff—like a battle pass, for example—that I haven’t really been able to factor into the experience, either. So consider this a review of a proper playthrough of the campaign with a danged-near-final version of the game. I’ve been all over the map, I’ve seen the credits—actually, if we’re being technical here, the credit scroll wasn’t complete in the version of the game I played—and so on.

Here’s a short version of my thoughts on the game, in case you just want a real top-level, pros and cons sort of thing. Read on for, ya know, the longer version.

• I had a mostly excellent time with the campaign in Diablo IV.
• The changes to the way health potions work make playing the game a more active experience when compared to Diablo III, where I often felt unkillable.
• I think the game’s overall look is technically excellent but lacks variety. It’s rainy, dark, and bleak. While you get various visual motifs such as “snow” and “desert,” I think the overall darker tone of the game gets to be a little repetitive. That said, the game does “moist cave” extremely well.
• Speaking of repetitive, enemy variety also feels a little low. By the end of the game it feels like the game is just, like, “uh… how about skeletons and wraiths this time?”
• Those last two points add up to making the campaign feel like it runs out of gas about two-thirds of the way through. Some quests and plot points just drag along while others are there and gone in a flash.
• The immediate post-game epilogue was pretty much more of the same, though completing tasks gives you a new currency to spend.
• I think most of these issues will be mitigated if not eliminated completely by playing the retail version in a more leisurely manner, as trying to blast through the campaign extremely quickly left me a little cold.
• My initial reaction to playing through the game with a character that would be wiped before retail was “well, whatever, I’m sure I’ll want to do all this again as soon as the game comes out and I’ll just skip all the cutscenes next time.” But upon reflection, I’m not exactly jonesing to jump back in and marathon the campaign all over again right away.
• Playing through Street Fighter 6 at the same time probably swayed me one way or the other, leading to thoughts like “hey, maybe I should stop playing this and go punch evil refrigerators for awhile.”
• I think I may have enjoyed my time with Diablo III more, but it’s close. I will certainly return to D4 at launch, and I’m curious to see how it feels with “real” character(s).

Sometimes you just need to click on some skeletons until they explode. And while I think we can all agree that clicking on skeletons until they explode is its own reward, it’s nice when you can build a character and maybe find some new swords or whatever along the way. This is the general premise of the entire Diablo franchise, and that holds true in the current release, Diablo IV. In most of the ways that matter, this is a fine addition to the Diablo lineage, though as I found myself blasting through the last act or two of the campaign, a nagging feeling entered my head: Should I just be playing Diablo III instead?

Diablo IV is a very similar game. As someone who mostly played a barbarian in the previous game, I found myself right at home here, as the class more or less has the same skills for you to choose from. But getting those skills comes from something resembling a more traditional skill tree this time around, where Diablo III would dole at specific abilities as you raised your character level. This gives you more flexibility as you’re working your way towards max level, though I felt like I was mostly in the same spot, options-wise, by the time I hit level 20 or so. I can’t really speak to the other classes, as I was pretty focused on getting through the campaign during the limited time reviewers were granted access to a pre-release environment.

That campaign is focused yet again on the battle between angels and devils, and the humans that get caught in the middle. Lilith, the daughter of Mephisto, gets a lot of screen time here. Early on, your character is forced to ingest Lilith’s blood, creating a bond between you and the demon that really only manifests as a mechanism for flashbacks, allowing you to keep up with what’s going on as you chase Lilith around the map. I think the story plays around in a pretty gray area, making the angels seem like pompous assholes and the demons seem, well, almost sensible by comparison, but these facets of the story are bogged down by a lot of slow-moving story beats and drawn out late-game quests that just take a little too long to get where they’re going. Ultimately, though, the game makes it feel like it’s building towards something resembling actual player choice, but rather than let you make an actual interesting decision or two, the game just makes those choices for you and carries on to its predetermined end. It would have been neat to see players perhaps fall into endgame factions or something based on some campaign choices, but that’s just not what this game is. By the time I reached the second-to-last act I was more than ready for the story to wrap up.

Speaking of acts, the structure of the game is broken up into multiple acts, but the game gives you quests from the first three acts all at once, so you could go work on some Act II stuff before you’ve finished Act I. The story is broken apart into enough different threads so as to keep this all lined up, but it combines with the game’s level scaling to make the entire map feel a little aimless. With some fairly extreme late-game exceptions and a couple of tougher side-quests, the entire game scales to your level. This isn’t the first game to do this, of course, it’s a fairly common idea. But I found that it kept the game from having any real highs or lows. The action was the same throughout. I used my skills effectively and the enemies died. But I never felt like I was just scraping through an encounter by the skin of my teeth and I never felt like I was truly more powerful than the wraiths, skeletons, and other creeps that make up the game’s collection of enemies. It’s even-keeled to a fault.

Speaking of the collection of enemies, there aren’t enough different types of enemies in this game. As you wander the map, various areas will go from skeletons to goatmen, from goatmen to wraiths, to zombies, to spiders, and back again. By the end of the game it’s like the game is out of things to throw at you and is just thinking “well, uh, what if we give you wraiths and spiders this time? Ehhhh?” But with the exception of a late-game romp through a new area or two, the game feels like it’s out of ideas about 2/3rds of the way through.

The catch is that right up until I started feeling like the game was running out of gas, I was having a fantastic time with it, just like its predecessor. The action feels fluid and fun, the build choices feel mostly meaningful, and the environments are a joy to stomp through. For me, the most meaningful gameplay change is a bit of a weird one to explain, but stick with me here. In Diablo III and IV, health potions drop on the ground from time to time, when enemies are defeated. You can hold a limited number of them. In Diablo III, picking up health potions would give you health immediately, if you needed it. In Diablo IV, health potions are only used manually, and they give you no health on pickup. At times, especially if you built your character to be as survivable as possible, Diablo III felt like it was running on auto-pilot. Even on higher tiers of difficulty, death required you to make  a big pile of mistakes back-to-back-to-back. By forcing you to actually use potions, Diablo IV is more directly engaging. You have to keep tabs on your health at all times and pop a potion when needed. You have to make sure you’re moving around the battle just enough to collect new potions as they pop out, too, since you can only hold a few of them at a time (this number increases as you play). Maybe I was unlucky, but it also seems like there’s a lot less gear out there with health regen on it, so overall I’d call the act of playing Diablo IV a significantly more active experience.

So I don’t have an banger here at the end to really wrap this one up, because I still feel like there’s more work to be done. I’m curious to spend time with more classes, which is something that’s made a little bit easier via the inclusion of extra bonuses and benefits that you’ll find that add stats and skill points to every character you create. I’m curious to see how the game works out with a realm full of people ready to team up or fight you, and that’s something I haven’t really seen yet, either. The framework here is extremely solid and nicely rewarding, even if aspects of the story don’t hit as hard as the developers probably intended. If they make good on their post-release promises of new quests and content every few months, this has a real opportunity to last at least as long as Diablo III did, if not longer. But I’m going to have to wait and see a little but on that one. Either way, if you’re a fan of Diablo’s specific brand of action-RPG, you’ll find a ton of that here, and most of it’s really good.