Napalm Riot

Well hopefully many of us are familiar with the age old classic, Diablo II. Unlike most games, even the expansion, Lord of Destruction, was a great game too. So seven years later is it worth while to replay it?

Graphics. Well hell I was 11 years old when I played this game back in the day. Therefore I wasn't exactly a self-proclaimed video game reviewer. But in terms of what I can discern now, the graphics were reasonable good for the time, and the graphics do nothing of the sort to degrade the game's experience. One thing however, is that it seems things weren't too 3-D yet, so they created area's too look 3-D via art and perspectives and the like. For instance, in the Arcane Sanctuary, I can kill some monsters who are on a floor above me. There are many instances in this game where this 2D glitch occurs, and well is advantageous to the player, so I'm not complaining.

The sound is great too. I think I'm pretty impressed with the game in terms of sound because for every intractable character in the game, there was a voice associated with it. It makes a game as a whole sound much more real. I mean heck, I'm playing Dead Rising right now on the 360, and most of the characters don't have a voice, I find that very irritating. Nonetheless, aside from the superb voice quality, the music is great. And well the sound of the throngs of hellish masses you're slaying does get a little boring.

The controls is my little pet peeve. They're simplistic yet a little frustrating at times. left click to move, mouse to rotate your chatacter, and right click is your ability/spell. To switch between spells you assign them keys on the keyboard. My problem is that well you use 1, 2, 3, and 4 for potions, and F1, F2, F3, F4, etc for switching between spells, so I often eat away at my potions trying to switch spells... And also there's no global cool down on potions so it's easy to chew through them.

The story is ok... Good versus evil, blah blah blah... Hellish demons etc. I'm sure you'd find a much richer story from the Diablo II books. Unfortunately from normal, to nightmare, to hell you play through the story 3 times, so if you're playing through the game for story, it'll take you less that a few days on normal.

Fun... It's pretty damn fun. It starts a little slow in the beginning, but once you have enough levels and enough skills it's loads of fun. It's really just awesome to plow down throngs of demons, etc, etc... Unfortunately aside from playing through the game (which most people dont, they get rushed), the only other things to do are different assortments of leveling runs such as the cow level, Baal runs, or Chaos runs... Then after that if you have a MF character (magic find) you basically run Mephisto runs all day to get good loot.

So the main part of this review.... Is it worth a replay? It'd say it depends. If you loved Diablo II and you're not burnt out, by all means play it again, it's so ridiculous how fast you can level, I made an MF sorceress as my first character, and she's already 65 and I've been playing for 6 days. The real secret is Baal runs, and the like. Leveling is so easy in the game, it makes it that much more fun. But if you haven't played D2 or didn't get into it heavily when it was popular, by all means play it, you're missing out.