Diablo II: Resurrected (2021)

Since Metroid Prime Remastered physical is harder to find than a polar bear in the Sahara, I ended up grabbing a digital copy of Diablo 2: Resurrected. I only played it for a bit in the early 2000s, a few years after it came out, and for whatever reason never got terribly far in it.

Unfortunately that lack of nostalgia paired with the fact that my first real Diablo experience was D3, I'm having a little trouble making progress. At first I felt like it was far too easy, so I cranked up the difficulty to 4 players (where the game difficulty is scaled as if four people are playing). Still, it doesn't seem to be too difficult with the exception of one monster when I was saving Deckard Cain).

The gameplay itself is.. dated. That's obvious of course, but I sure miss the variety of attacks from D3, and I keep getting caught in what I'll call "inventory hell". See, action RPGs were my absolute bread and butter for many years, and I loved all the inventory management. But my biggest issue that I keep running into and can't find a solution is that the attack button also picks things up off the ground. Very often I find myself in the midst of dozens of monsters, hacking and slacking my way through, only to get encumbered and lose my attack speed because I picked up some massive junk battle axe that filled my inventory and weighed me down. I wish there was a setting to avoid pick-ups while you're mid-combat.

Some good things - the load times are SO short that you can actually jump into the game for 5 minutes and make progress. The whole game is fairly quick. That being said, I can't stand stamina bars that drain when you're running. Drives me bonkers. You walk very slowly, but at least there are plenty of portals.

I am playing as a Necromancer which is apparently a bad first choice, and I think I know why - I currently have a mercenary hired, as well as the ability to spawn 3 skeletons + 1 skeleton mage, so I can literally bust into anywhere with a small army that obliterates everything in front of me. I've resorted to using a bow so I can actually get some hits in.

Anyway, pretty fun game, but I don't know if I can finish the entire thing. I get Diablo, I know the fun is the gear grind, but coming from Diablo 3 and with no nostalgia to D2, it is very slow. A similar thing happened to me when I impulse-bought Dark Alliance 2 upon release (and the original was one of my favorites) and I was bored within 30 minutes. But for $13, even if I only play it for 10 hours, I'll feel like I got my money's worth.

This is a hard game to put down — not only because it’s very fun, but because its procedurally generated world resets every time you quit the game. When I play, I play for like… 4 hours each time. Lol. From finding the next permanent warp point, to clearing out a main quest dungeon that I finally tracked down, there’s always a couple more little things I want to do in this version of the world that I’ve painstakingly cleared out and explored before I say goodbye to it.

Act two of five had some really cool zones in it and I felt like my understanding and appreciation of the game really hit its stride during that part. I’m now getting deep into Act III which feels so gigantic and sprawling, pretty wild to explore around and try to find where to go here. The settings are really neat, and the overall atmosphere and story is so much more interesting to me than Diablo III, which failed to hold my attention for more than a few short sessions. I am feeling pretty positive on this game and looking forward to progressing further.

Get ready to see and hear messages like these a lot if you want to get into this game:

Potion spamming seems to be the way through the game, a pretty awkward balance where inventory and mana pool would feel a lot better if they just upped the size of both and dropped less potions to compensate.

Luckily, the game seems to be worth the trouble. I’ve hit a bit of a rough spot in Act 2 where I feel either underleveled or underequipped, but the procedurally generated nature of the levels makes even re-running a dungeon you already did feel pretty much fine. Slinging fireballs all over the place has not quite gotten old yet.

I was never really into Diablo 2 growing up, it was huge in my friend circle, but the gameplay I saw I found a bit repetitive and meh.

When Resurrected released on the Switch, decades later, and constantly hearing it's one of the best games ever, I decided to buy it and give it a try.

I am still very early on, but see some of the appeal, the gameplay is tactical enough to feel like choices matter, but simple and repetitive enough that I can mostly just zone out and enjoy the hack and slash.

I'm not certain how long it will keep my attention, but for the time being it has been a perfect lunch break Switch title for me.

Played about 6 hours so far. It seems kind of fun, i am still in act 1 with a sorcerer, cause there's quite a lot to explore. I haven't played D2 before but i have played D3, so the D2 all feels quite.... outdated, but this is also part of the charm i guess. The atmosphere so far is a lot better than in D3 though, it's way more 'dark' / less colorful, what you'd expect of a game about hell. There are some annoyances , like the tiny backpack so you have to port to town like every 10 minutes to stash / sell stuff, and identifying each item one by one is really tedious. But i guess they wanted to keep stuff as it was in the original D2. I , for one, wouldn't mind some small QoL modernization on that part, i mean, no-one likes clicking 3423420 items individually to identify them right?

PS5 performance is really good, it loads almost instantly and there is no lag or anything even with a lot of monsters about. Graphics, of course improved from the original, are still a bit 'old', it sorta feels like playing a really early ps4 / late p3 game, even on ps5. On that note, you can also play in the original d2 graphics i you want to, it's easy to switch on the fly.

I think I'll be playing for a while as it's giving me enough enjoyment so far, despite the little annoyances.

Starting in 10 minutes, very hyped! :) I never played Diablo 2 when it came out, i was more into final fantasy and sim city back then. So i'm going completely fresh into this one, haven't looked up anything and just going to figure out everything on my own!

By the way, i love that the PS5 page for the game shows a countdown timer for when you can start to play!