Can you say DISAPPOINTMENT?

User Rating: 5 | Diablo III PC
I'm going to make this short. If you like Diablo 1 and 2 then you'll probably like D3 but that's about as far as it goes. First off the story behind it is hackneyed and cliched. We've seen it all before. I'm not even going to waste time spoiling it because you really can't spoil boring and contrived.

Secondly, it's just too straight forward and just too easy. I guess when I realized I hadn't even come close to dying against the bosses was when I realized that this game really is hollow in a lot of ways.
They put in a craft system because people always whine about it if you don't but it's utterly worthless in most regards because you've already picked up better loot before you get to a craftable you can actually use. On top of this, all the effects are random so if you're a barbarian guess what! Your materials, that took you a half hour to gather, were just wasted because you got a piece of garbage that is high in intelligence! NICE going Blizzard.

Outside of this, there is a varied skill system and they're all boring in that you can't even control the hot keys very well and most of the skill combinations are hit and miss. Some things work ok and some things don't.

The real kicker is that after hundreds of games, Blizzard figured gamers would rather have chat screens that are unmodifiable containing no font size options which means since the text requires a telescope or microscope to read, no one bothers even talking to one another. Wonderful.

At the end of the day though, it's all about defeating Diablo and well any 12 year old should have no problem doing that. Whoopee. The saddest part of all this is that you won't feel one bit of attachment to any NPC, EVER. I mean seriously, we're not talking about a purely emotional attachment but more like a creative attachment to FUN THINGS. I mean who the hell doesn't remember Griswold in D1, with this "what kin I do fer ya!" My wifey and I still tease each other with that phrase.

One only need experience the pathetic set up for the game play to understand that this is not the Blizzard we grew up with. No, this Blizzard wants us all droning away on battle.net even if we want to play alone so that they can hook us in their really neat scheme of creating an online auction house that requires real money!

Oh joy! Guess who takes a cut of all the auctions? This alone is easily one of the most cynical ploys by a game company in a long time. The last time I felt this degraded, Roberta Williams decided to turn Gabriel Knight from Live Action to boring animation. Using scotch tape and cat hair for a moustache, indeed. (you have to be old and played the GK series to get that)

Well I did warn you it was pathetic but I wouldn't try to convince anyone of how utterly lame this concept is to anyone who is stupid enough to use it. The only problem will be that the game constantly crashes and yay! you get to be denied playing for "maintenance" whenever Blizzard removes their head from their rear end to finally fix whatever has been broken since release. Man, it doesn't get better than that!

With that, let's just face it, this type of point&click hack&slash is way past its prime and should have been retired but when you're making millions it's hard to pass up. Blizzard makes a few million, fans get shafted, hey, sounds like a great day at the office to me. The only problem is, you'd have to be dense to want to buy into a sequel.