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Overview
Diablo and Diablo II
comprise a powerful franchise in the gaming industry. When
Diablo was first released it went to the top of the sales
charts. That was three years ago. Naturally, everyone who ever
played the first game anxiously awaited the sequel with baited
breath. And for the most part the wait was worth it. But
the game isn't without some pretty nasty flaws.
That hasn't stopped
Diablo
II to be incredibly successful? The game, like its predecessor
provides lots of fast
paced fun. The background story that explains your quest is
both interesting and oddly compelling, setting the mood effectively.
The game designers at
Blizzard are masters of their craft. For a game developer,
they have put out relatively few games: Diablo, Warcraft I and II,
Starcraft and now Diablo II. But every one of those games are
among the best of their genre. The guys at Blizzard have
gotten a reputation for hitting a home run every time. There are legions of fans that are ready to buy
anything this company puts out. And for good reason.
When you pick up one of their games you know you're going to have
lots of fun. And when it comes to games, having fun
is the bottom line.
Hey, what's that Paladin
doing? Click on the Image to find out!
Gameplay
Diablo II takes all the
fun elements of the first game and tries to add more of the
same. Even with all the additional items and longer gameplay,
Diablo II is really just a bigger and better Diablo I. And,
well, if you have a successful formula why mess with it? One of the main criticisms of the
original game was that while it claimed to be a roleplaying game it
was really a hybrid action/RPG that was very light on the RPG
end. While Diablo II beefs up the character development aspect
of the game it remains RPG light and action heavy. That's not
necessarily bad. The balance Blizzard has achieved with Diablo
II is incredibly compelling. But
if you're looking for deep Roleplaying elements you'll need to look
elsewhere. This game is simply: kill things, get
experience and money; get levels and buy more powerful stuff; kill
more powerful critters, get more experience, etc. Sound
boring? The folks at Blizzard have certainly made this
lots of fun. So much fun in fact, I played the game for at
least 200 hours before deciding I'd had enough. The
game revolves around a single character, the hero. When you
start the game, you get to pick from four hero types: a barbarian, a
paladin, a rogue, a sorcerer or a necromancer. Each character has its own strengths and weaknesses and
are designed to cover the basic play styles of most people. You
won't find cutting edge innovation in new gameplay at this level but you'll find
that there is a wide variety of play value locked up in each
character class. After
you pick your character, you start out the game in the Rogue
Encampment. There you talk to one of the wandering characters
(NPCs) and get your first instructions. The first time you
meet an NPC, particularly merchants, they will describe to you what
they are and give some instructions on how to deal with them.
As the game progresses these NPCs also give you quests, items and
other things that aid you along the way to finishing the game. Your
overall quest is to track down Diablo, the Lord of Terror, and
vanquish him. This was the goal in the original game but
something went terribly wrong after that hero did his job and saved
all of humanity from Hell's evil. Diablo wasn't actually
vanquished. In fact the hero of the original game becomes the
unwitting harbinger of Diablo's return. To find Diablo you try
to catch up with the original hero in time to stop Diablo's return
and thus the end of life as we know it...and there's nothing that
Hell wants more than to be really bad and evil to the innocent
people of earth. As
the game progresses your character gains greater experience and
achieves new levels. As your hero achieves new
levels, he/she gets points that can be applied to improving various
"stats" such as Strength, Dexterity, Vitality and
Stamina. Strength is important to improve because it allows
your hero to use more powerful armor and weapons. Dexterity is
important for getting a better chance to hit your enemies and to be
able to use throwing/bow weapons. Vitality is important for
magic users and stamina increases your character's hit points and
makes them tougher to kill. Different character types benefit from
certain stats more than others. Choosing which stat to develop
and how much is very important to your hero's ultimate success. Perhaps
the most innovative addition to Diablo II from the original is the
Skill Tree. AT
each level you get a point to spend toward gaining and improving a
specific ability. Each character type has its own set of
unique abilities and each set has several offensive and defensive
trees from which to choose. You won't be able to develop every
skill before you end the game so choosing which skills to develop is
very important to your hero's success...especially later on.
Fortunately, it's difficult to completely mess up your character and
all skills have their advantages. When
I played the game I started out with a Paladin, naturally.
These are devout warriors pattered after the orders of religious
knights of the Crusades era of the Medieval period. I had originally
figured I'd mess around a bit and start over testing a each
character class in turn until I settled on one I truly liked.
But I liked the Paladin so much that I continued with him through
the end. My
second character was a Rogue. This is a female character (You
can't be a female Paladin or Barbarian and you can't be a male
Sorcerer or Rogue). I concentrated on making her a great
archer and she turned out to be an incredible archer. She
also turned out to be significantly more successful than my
Paladin. One of the archer skills is to be able to shoot
multiple arrows per shot. This proved to be so useful I never
really used any other skill. When I met up with Diablo at the
end, she dispatched him much faster than my Paladin and with less
damage to herself. Later
on in the "Nightmare" level of Diablo II I discovered that
cold arrows are quite useful and the fire arrows are indispensable
at times. The best advice I can give you here is to experiment
with new skills and try to get a mixture of skills. However,
you'll probably want to concentrate on one branch of the skill tree
more than others. The Barbarian is
a pure fighter who can wield two weapons at once, jump over crevices
and simply dish out more damage faster than any other. He is
probably the easiest character class to play in Act I and II.
He kills many creatures with on hit. He can run fast and wades
into combat with greater confidence than any other character
class. He'll take great damage but dish out even
greater. The
Sorcerer is the typical weak magic user that gains tremendous power
in the later stages of the game. Her main weakness is her
health and ability to use powerful armor. If you can keep her
out of melee combat she'll make mincemeat of her enemies.
Because she burns through mana quicker than any other character
concentrating on developing her skills at rejuvenating mana is very
important for her success. The
Necromancer is the most difficult character to play. They die
easily and early on are quite weak and slow to develop. Their
main ability is to raise skeletons from the dead and conjure golems
of various types. These creatures do most of the Necromancer's
fighting. He can jump in to help if you are careful to avoid
getting targeted by enemy creatures. Run out of bodies to turn
into skeletons and you are in trouble quick. In later levels
skeletons are easily killed by other creatures and keeping enough
around to keep progressing gets very difficult. The
game doesn't require a super powerful system to run on, but as usual
the minimum specs are going to be close to unplayable. There
are times when the screen is going to be filled with dozens of
enemies. That's a bad time for your computer to start having a
heart attack. Even with a powerful computer, the game loads in
graphics often, causing the game to "hiccup." This
is rarely a problem but occasionally it can end up being disastrous
if it happens at the wrong moment. Once I got a serious
"hiccup" and lost control of my character for a
time. I escaped only by hitting ESC and saving the game.
This puts you back to town. Unfortunately though it deletes
anything you left on the ground and resets all the hunting areas so
you have to kill everything again. The
bottom line on the gameplay is that it's a huge amount of fun.
The replay value is very solid. I've played the game in excess
of 100 hours and still expect to spend another few hundred hours
over the next six months. The main reason for this is that
after killing Diablo there's still lots to do. There are many
unique and special items that you can find throughout the
game. You want to continue to play the game to get these
items. Some
of these items form "sets" so that when you have every one
of the item in a set the entire set becomes even more
powerful. You'll have to spend many hundreds of hours playing
the game before you'll even have a chance at getting a full set of the
special items. What you'll have to do in the end is to
get online and trade with other people who have pieces you want and
who want pieces you have. Multiplayer
Online Gaming Unfortunately,
if you don't plan to get online and trade with other players it's
almost impossible to get a full set of unique items. So, the
game essentially forces you to go online. While this is a great way to encourage
player interaction and increase Diablo II's commercial lifespan ( i.e., they make more
money), it makes the single player game less desirable for one
simple reason, STORAGE. You simply don't have enough of
it. This is almost a fatal flaw and degrades your ability to
enjoy the game in the Nightmare and Hell levels. Once
you've filled up your stash which isn't very hard to do, you must
use your inventory to store items you don't want to sell. If
you're trying to collect one of the special sets you'll have to
decide ahead of time which one you want and sell everything
else. Maybe after a thousand hours of playing the game you'll
end up finding all the pieces. Not very practical and you'll
probably give up long before you get a set. This
part of the game is really just for multiplayer and you'd better get
used to the idea of logging online and finding someone who has the
things you need. You'll need something to trade back or a lot
of cash so go prepared. If you aren't willing to go online (or
just can't), then you're unfortunately out of luck. Nit-Picks,
Problems and Oddities to Beware Before
moving on to the Christian Sense aspect of this review, I need to
point out the few things that have the ability to spoil your fun. For all of Blizzard's
abilities they can make some silly mistakes in game design. The
first problem is really very minor but it's worth noting. Occasionally your character
litterally gets "hung up" and won't move
or attack. Fortunately this is rare but it's happened a good
dozen times to me and in two cases my character died as a result. To
fix this click on an completely different place to move your
character slightly. That usually fixes the problem. Another,
bigger irritant is the way the Horadric Cube works. It acts as both
an extra storage (remember how you run out of storage
quickly?) place and as a way to transform items into other
items. Now, it's a great aspect of the game to figure out what
converts to what. You can get some pretty neat items.
But there is also a really nasty "gotchya" waiting to
damage your fun (or enrage you as happened to me once :). If
you put in enough items to cause a transformation, those items
transform and anything else in the cube simply disappears, but not
every time. Sometimes
the transformation doesn't happen if you have certain other items in
it. Because
of this inconsistency I didn't realize what was going on until
disaster struck. Again, I was overflowing with items, was
using the Cube for starage and didn't want to drop things on the
ground. I had the cube filled with gems and
other powerful items. Knowing that the three gems of the same
type would transmute to a more powerful gem, II hit the transmute button. To
my horror a dozen gems, including perfect and flawless gems I'd
gotten from defeating Diablo disappeared. Even worse a couple
powerful items also disappeared. All I got back was three
chipped emeralds turned into a flawed emerald. I could have
wept. Those items took 50 hours of gameplay to accrue.
The second time it happened I accidentally hit the transmute
button. Have you ever had your hand twitch on your mouse
before? I lost an angelic ring, three powerful
amulets and something else I don't remember. What I got in
return was a
completely worthless amulet. By this time I'd lost most of the
powerful items that had taken 26 levels (Including the cow level) to
obtain. Can anyone say UNFUN? Needless
to say, I've been very careful with the Cube since. When I go to pick stuff out of the cube I break into a sweat as my
mouse cursor hovers near that transmute button. Unfortunately
this little flaw makes it quite undesirable to experiment with the
cube since the risks are not very often worth the reward. Unless you're hard core
and don't mind losing your hard won stuff, the cube will likely be
an exercise in frustration and loss. Go to www.diabloii.net
and read up on the known formulas unless you really want to figure
this out for yourself. Except for improving gems, I've yet to
find any use for the Cube. If you need better items, you're better off gambling for
them. Once you have more items on you than you can store and
your character has everything he wants or needs and there is no
advantage to you to keep your gems then you'll probably want to
experiment some. The
third thing that bugged me seemed completely off the wall and one of
those "What were they thinking?" things. This silly
thing happens
after you beat the game. A timer pops up and warns you the
game will end in XX seconds. A countdown ensues and you begin
to panic. What!? What am I supposed to do? Well,
what you're supposed to do get back to the Fortress to talk to the
angel and pick stuff off the ground before the
timer gets to zero. You have no time to savor your
victory. Instead of Diablo you're facing the unbeatable
countdown clock. When I finished the game with my archer I
had some really cool stuff at the Pandemonium Fortress on the ground (not in my
stash) because I had run out of STORAGE. A friend of mine was nearby and I said. "Is
there anything special you can do when you win the game and get that
timer?" I'd run to where Diablo had appeared and was
hoping for a secret level or something. He
yelled back, "No, you just have to get all your stuff off the
ground. I don't know what those guys at Blizzard were
thinking." I
replied, "You mean the stuff I left on the ground at the
fortress will poof? He
replied, "Yeah!" I
screamed, "Ack!" then glanced at the timer and rushed
back. I got one item off the ground before the countdown
ended. Can you say, UNFUN? Instead of enjoying the final
movie I was muttering dark words about the game designers. I
could throw out a few other nitpicky criticisms but these are the
only ones that actually caused me to feel like the game was being
"unfair" to me. IE, it did something that added no
gameplay value and caused my character irreparable harm in an way I perceived
as unfair. And since you can't save the game you can't load a
game from a previous save and recover from a disaster. If a
disaster befalls you you must live with it. Fortunately
Blizzard took great pains to ensure that you can recover from most
disasters. I wish they'd allowed you to store more stuff,
however. I can trace most of my painful experiences to this
one arbitrary limitation. The
bottom line, however, is that I played this game for hundreds of
hours and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. I'll be switching to
online play and try to trade with other players to see if I can get
a full set of unique items. If I'm successful then the game
will probably have another couple hundred hours of gameplay left in
it for me. The online play can be quite laggy and early on
when I tried it out the servers crashed often. The single
player game was more compelling to me at the time. Christian
Sense So
how does this game hold up from a Christian Sense? Well, since
the game borrows heavily from Judeo Christianity to formulate the
story and the characters behind it so there's much to say. But
before
I get into specifics, it must be kept in mind that Diablo II follows
the classic mythological elements of fantasy in regards to its
characters (for the most part). They introduce their own
twists but this is a classic medieval fantasy world with magic as an
accepted element. The
game takes its main source for conflict by pitting the forces of
heaven against the forces of hell. However, unlike recent
biblically influenced games such as Saints of Virtue or War in
Heaven, the folks at Blizzard aren't trying to make a biblically
accurate game. But even so, the game isn't without pretty
explicitly Christian elements. The
Characters Clearly,
the Paladin is the most "Christian friendly" of the
characters types. He's a holy warrior dedicated to dishing out
holy wrath upon evil. He strives to be pure and devoted to his
God. It's no mistake that I played a Paladin. This isn't
an explicitly Christian character but it's as close as this game
gets to one. The
Necromancer is the most problematic of the characters. Playing
with the dead is strictly forbidden in the Bible and that's
precisely what necromancers do. Now, he's not really raising
dead things...they are pixels and computer coded algorithms.
Arguably it's not the same thing as the biblical mandate against
raising the dead (check out the Witch of Endor in the Old
Testament). But no matter how you try to candy coat it,
there's simply no way to make this character type palatable from a
Christian sense. The
Sorceress is another problematic character, mostly because of the
title she carries. Sorcerers are explicitly mentioned in the
Bible and not in a favorable light. This character isn't the
same type sorcerer mentioned in the Bible and doesn't really follow
the classic type of sorcerer found in other medieval fantasy games. The
Rogue and Barbarian are basically fighters but without the religious
implications of the Paladin. If you are against computer
animated violence or the use of magic in a game then this is
where you'll find problems. In fact all character use magic
and are violent so if these are two important negative factors for
you then this game will fail CS badly. The
Violence The
level of violence in this game is extreme. While all the violence is
against evil beings, it's still constant and sustained killing. Sometimes it's
quite graphic. Sometimes it's images of mangled and
dismembered bodies. Bodies will be displayed as hung on hooks, cut into pieces, disemboweled and so on. Of
course this is all done by the bad evil guys but that doesn't make
it all right. Let's not kid ourselves, this is there to
appeal to the young teen boys that are the major purchasing base for
the game. There's no redeeming value in portraying violence in
this manner or to mix it with sexual overtones. Some of the evil creatures are buxom babes
that show off ample portions of their voluptuous bodies. For
those who think I find this disturbing only because it appeals to
me, well you're right. I find myself drawn to beautifully well
endowed women in string bikini armor. And sexy voices tickle my
senses. Mix that with the fun gameplay and, yes, I'm disturbed
by my own reaction. Duh. If I wasn't I wouldn't be writing
this. I
will say this though, the overall level of violence and exploitation
noted above seems a little less than with the first game. I
also didn't find this element to be overwhelming in Diablo II.
Mostly I found it annoying to have it shoved in my face.
Eventually I simply ignored it (Did I just became desensitized?). The
World and its Religion Well,
there's none really. They refer to Heaven and Hell and angels
but beyond that there are scant indications that the folks at
Blizzard intended to anything more than capitalize on classic images
and themes. The good guys are on Heaven's side and the bad
guys are Hell's side. There is no reference to the Creator or
God. One
thing I appreciated about the game was its minimal use of the
pentagram. Since so much of the game revolves around fighting
evil in places where evil holds sway, they could have used this cliché
of Heaven/Hell games in many places. I also didn't see the upside
down cross cliché' used except once and that was subtle enough that
I didn't go, "OH, my! It's an upside down cross! This must be a really evil pace. Oh
my! What am I going to do!" ::Smirk!:: Their
depiction of an angel, however, was pretty cool. Instead of
the standard wings the angels had glowing, undulating tendrils that
fanned out from their backs which were suggestive of wings. My hats off to the folks at Blizzard for a creative and
effective way of portraying the power of angels and avoiding another
cliché. Of course, the game's not without its share of cliché's
but I appreciate the effort to keep some of them out of the game. There
was one thing that caught my eye. In the Pandemonium Fortress,
watch the Paladin merchant. I saw him drop to his knee and
draw the sign of the cross. Now, if that isn't explicitly
Christian, I don't know what is. A minor thing, but I thought
it was nifty. The
End Result So,
in the end the game is fun but suffers from some nasty (but not
critical) flaws. You'll get at least a hundred hours of fun
out of the game since there's much more to discover after you defeat
Diablo. It
suffers from the Christian's perspective when it uses Christian
symbols and themes in ways that are more inspired by Asian ideas of
Good and Evil than the Bible. Nevertheless it doesn't abuse
Christian sensibilities intentionally. The level of violence and its
graphic presentation.
Final
Score
Highlights: Great
fun and solid replay value. Game is designed to enhance playing it
online. Skill Trees are well done. Bazzillions of
powerful items to keep you happy.
Lowlights:
Lack of Storage affects your ability to gather some of the more
unique items (especially those that make up sets), Horadric Cube
gives low return for what it takes.
Hints:
Magical resistance is crucial later in the game. Early
on concentrate on improving your ability to do damage using your
basic skills and weapons. Passive skills are very important to
develop. Later on, defense is important so don't ignore skills
that improve that rating.
Recommendation:
This game isn't for kids. The level of violence and the
graphic depictions of mutilations are sometimes quite
disturbing. If the CS score isn't a big concern to you then
you'll want to play this game. If CS is important to you then you'll
want to very carefully consider this before buying it. If
you're contemplating buying this for someone under 17, please be
cautioned. It's not rated 'M' for Mature players for nothing.
Even for older teens you'll want to judge their level of maturity
and their understanding of violence and Christian sensibilities
before buying them this game.
Age Appropriateness:
Older Teens and above (17+).
Christian
Sense (CS): 2 –
Necromancer, Sorcerer, level of violence and the way it's depicted
all push the score down.
Game
Engine (GE): 3.5 –
Nothing spectacular here. It's better than the original but is
somewhat dated in the quality of the graphics. The saving
point here is the spectacular spell effects.
Game
Play (GP): 4.5 –
They got this right. This is definitely a fun game.
Overall:
3.3 – This
game's score got drug down by its CS rating. |
