Because one can never have enough spare trousers.

User Rating: 8 | Diablo III PC
Diablo 3 is NOT a masterpiece. It is NOT a perfect game at all. It is the same hack and slash formula that Blizzard perfected and improved on. It is a game that was severely broken at launch. It is a game that is ripped on for requiring an internet connection to play. The graphics are barely up to par with modern games. The Prime Evils are all but absent, replaced with more predictable, cartoon-villain lesser evils Belial and Azmodan.

My first big complaint: The atmosphere. I don't know exactly when this started happening in games, but "DARK" games seem to be all about flash and no substance, there's plenty of blood of gore in this game, but there's no sense of real urgency, not overtone of evil and doom throughout the story. Everything is brighter and less atmospheric than the past two games. The color pallet is wide and colorful, not a bad thing when every war game has it's standard red, brown, and gray color pallet. But this is DIABLO, it's supposed to be dark. Now most levels that are supposed to be hellish are bright red and rust colored. Everything's well-lit so you can see every enemy in the room, never needing to worry about some knockback-crit monster lurking in the shadows. The dark, satanic, gothic atmosphere of the first two games has been erased to a more hollow, modern-fantasy setting.

Second: The Antagonists. The enemies themselves are wide-ranged and diverse in design, with well-made skins that make identifying the tankiest and the most dangerous enemies easy. However the difficulty of these enemies really bothered me. I did my first run-through as a Barbarian (Probably the easiest class in my opinion) and I did not die once until going to find the black soulstone and met Fallen Lunatics, who decided that I had had enough fun and killed me instantly by mobbing me and exploding. That kind of killed the pacing, but I quickly started to bait them into exploding on themselves. But this change of difficulty kept scaling up and up, harder-hitting and harder-built adversaries kept popping up and sometimes insta-killing me. But I never felt particularly challenged, I could still beat everything on the screen quickly as long as I dodged the cheap ones. Also, the Barbarian's earthquake is the most overpowered skill in the game. I don't quite know yet if the other classes have the same kind of win-all nukes, but if they do, then the difficulty is SEVERELY erratic.

Third: The "Lesser" Evils. Belial and Azmodan were honestly the least some of the least interesting or threatening villains I've seen in a game. After two or three of the prince's speeches, I knew he HAD to be Belial, so his great reveal was so disgustingly underwhelming that crushing him in that two-phase fight didn't feel any better than killing any other "Elite" monster. Azmodan didn't have any presence whatsoever, constantly using his face-projection promising me that every one of my actions was futile as I cut through hundreds of his minions with ease. He seemed like a horrible cartoon villain, always promising doom and destruction but delivering idle threats with hopeless minions. And fighting him took about two minutes before he dropped to the ground. Although the big reveal of new and improved hybrid Diablo did catch me somewhat by surprise, her/his presence was again underwhelming. Angels screamed that they needed to beat him back, as they were as incompetently underpowered as the demons! Beating Diablo wasn't anywhere as satisfying as in the previous games. And the ending DEMANDS expansion, almost as much as Diablo 2's ending promised one.

3rd: The Graphics and physics of the game. I LOVE physics. When a game has objects that shatter and fall apart, it appeals directly to my destruction fetish. And being rewarded with achievements and some bonus experience for it was like icing on a cake. The graphics of the game are fairly under-par in this generation of Crysis, Battlefields, Witchers and Minecrafts. But artistically, it has its own identifiable blizzard zing. Enemies and levels are wonderfully detailed, if not high-depth and resolution. And the randomly-generating dungeon engine ensures that although the ending of the level will be the same, the route and content of the dungeon is never predictable.

4th: The loot. Everyone craves that feeling of upgrading their current equipment to the next shiniest hat with its lightning-spewing defense. Diablo has enough loot to crash the world economy. But as you have to pick up any equipment to view it's properties, your inventory will FLOOD with items that you are mostly going to sell or break down into its basic components. But when you find your lightning hat, hoo-boy, is it satisfying. And when the real-money auction house is set up, I have the intent of bankrupting many a working-mom through their son with access to her credit-card.

Overall, the game is a cliched, underwhelming, balanced, crazy, cartoony, violent, chaotic, huge, colorful, addictive, repetitive, simple, and fun game that gets my recommendation. It's not the fountain of youth, but it's solid enough to keep you latched the your monitor in the wee hours of the 'morn searching endlessly for that next pair of shiny electric trousers.