Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Instant classic"

This game was truly an instant classic, as so many people loved so much Diablo I. The gameplay is as fun as the first one, the status system is more precise, the game is longer and have a difficulty system that increase replayability. In various ways a Diablo I improved, graphically and in the character development system.

But there are some things I didn't like, for instance the easy way we can gimp our character by choosing the wrong skills. While in the first Diablo it's almost impossible, the same thing that makes characters unique in Diablo II makes we do mistakes over and over. But it's part of the game difficulty, I guess, and a learning curve.

What really made me not give it a prime grade was that this game didn't follow the gothic line the first Diablo went. While in the first we felt alone in that dark European scenario, the second one was too much of a multiculturalist theme. The dungeons to hell were darker, bloodier and lonelier in the first Diablo, when we get to an Egyptian desert it kind of breaks the immersion. Not to mention the third scenario, that rain forest with those comic little men.

Despite that Diablo II is a superb game, it's incredible addictive, played for years... Various other games tried the same formula, but they failed because Diablo II is more than a system, it's an environment, it speaks about our long tradition, and that's why Diablos that are not Diablo don't make the same success. When we say "this game is not dark enough" we are saying "this game don't speak for our occidental European tradition, it's some modern boring thing".