Joe

Feels much more like D3 than D2. MMO-esque Cooldown management replaced fun combat, and (badly balanced) scaled level enemies replaced an actual sense of my character getting stronger. Good polish, good story, but mediocre core gameplay - not terrible, but not good. The story's pretty good - I found myself getting more and more into it over time. Lilith is cool - she's different, compared to other Diablo villain, but in a way that felt very appropriate to the lore. It felt like an evolution of (rather a revolution against) the lore of the series. They do a decent job of bringing back some of the dark vibe, but it feels like certain cutscenes and events in the early game (which I won't spoil) lean into this really hard... aaand then it pulls back and becomes more of a half-and-half mix of the darker vibe of the first two diablo games and Wow-esque story stuff. Main story is unskippable - including skipping voiced dialogue that you've already finished reading (ie: what you can do in literally every other rpg). There's also a LOT of it. Everything scales to your level, meaning that getting stronger doesn't actually do anything. Even worse, there have been times where I felt like the same area got harder when I gained levels - making me kinda want to avoid exp. This is NOT how I should feel when playing an rpg. The equipment isn't nearly as bad as in early D3 - there's greater variety and trade-off in terms of what to focus on, rather than you just needing to equip whatever has the most of your main stat. That said (at least in the initial world tier), I have yet to find a single piece of equipment that feels like even a very, very mild game-changer. Each new piece of equipment has ultimately just made my numbers slightly bigger (ie: 5% run walk, 3% mana regen, +1 to a single skill) - cumulatively useful, but never anything that made finding a piece of equipment feel truly lucky or important. [ie: how MMOs do it instead of how D2 did it, where finding a single unique item early on could change your whole experience of that playthrough]). The worst worst worst WORST part of it is the way that they cripple you on mana/otherNamesForTheSameThing. You get 100 of it, with VERY limited options for boosting it, and with most of your main attack abilities costing at least a quarter of it to use (sometimes half). It recharges... kinda fast-ish. The problem is that you use it up much, much faster than it charges. Managing the skills felt like trying to run a store with a skeleton crew - doable maybe, but with me never really having what I needed. This works for MMO's, which I suspect inspired this, but it does NOT work for a Diablo game - not if you're trying to recapture the magic that made D2 so beloved (which I honestly don't think they were trying to do, at least not more than halfheartedly, with it being well below their highest priority). Double the mana regen speed and maybe this game will be fun. MMO's are about constantly managing skills and cooldowns and maximizing dps, and clicking your limited defensive and dodge skills at efficient times. Diablo games are about killing stuff and having fun. Or at least they used to be, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Blizzard was a company worth admiring, who knew how to consistently make the best games in the business.