Turns out the secret to beating this game was to just give up on playing a warrior and switch to Rogue. With ranged on my side and plenty of dex, and some kiting, I was able to get all the way to Diablo. He was pretty tough but with a ton of potions I managed to take him down. The butcher was really hard (if I had the right spells he would be easy) so I had to cheese him. Most of the other fights weren't too bad, some elite packs gave me a lot of trouble. It was challenging and fun.

The graphics are still pretty good, killing the monsters is still fun. I like how all their corpses persists so you can see the carnage you unleashed. Towards the end I started wishing there were was a bit more variety with the monsters. In hell it seemed there would just be 2 types of monster per level and some of those were re-cycled between levels (Succubus).

I'm not sure what to think about Hellfire. I imagine it added things I didn't notice like new items and quests etc. I ended up beating Diablo and being confused that there wasn't an "after" to do the expansion. Turns out I was supposed to do the Hellfire dungeon before Diablo, but I had no idea. (There is this farmer guy you need to talk to, but after he told me to buzz off the first time I forgot to keep trying to talk to him.)

So when I did the Hellfire levels, I was a bit over leveled so they were pretty easy. The first boss went down like paper, the second took a bit longer to kill but he didn't have any strong abilities like Diablo. Just a basic attack. So while he at least took a few hits it was a disappointing fight.

The new enemies were pretty cool, and the music was nice. It was actually better music than the base game. The first dungeon was really dark and ugly, but OK. It had a gross Alien vibe to it. The second dungeon was more colorful and reminded me of some of the Diablo 3 levels!

I don't know how much Hellfire cost back in the day, but if I bought this as a kid I think I might have been disappointed? Though it is more Diablo, so who is to say.