Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Uninspired"

Things I like about Diablo 3:
1. The combat is tactile and pretty fun.

2. The sound design is fairly good, but is lacking in a few key areas.

Things I don't like about Diablo 3:
1. Itemization is boring and very straightforward. There's almost never a hard decision when it comes to choosing gear.

2. The story is very uninspired and predictable. It's told in a small variety of very impersonal, ineffective and annoyingly cliche ways that make it feel like an unnecessary interruption to the actual gameplay.

3. Forced always-online DRM is very inconvenient and intrusive. You will often have to replay entire sections of quests and restart from the beginning of areas because of a blip in your internet connection or if the servers are feeling upset and need a scolding. All of this unnecessary inconvenience added to the fact that I almost exclusively play solo makes it even more frustrating.

4. The antagonists (and protagonists, actually) are very one-dimension, unintimidating and frankly, kind of stupid. "Oh, I know what will stop these pesky heroes from ruining my plans and killing me! I'll just tell them all of my plans and exactly how to kill me!". That kind of stupidity makes them very unbelievable and very uninteresting.

5. The dialogue in nearly all aspects and appearances is absolutely and horrendously bland, banal and unbelievable. I don't think there was a single line in the entire game that might make me think "Yeah, that's a real thing that a person would say in that situation". I have a hard time believing any real effort was put into the dialogue other than typing it up and having somebody record it being regurgitated out of an actor's face hole. The dialogue is literally worse than any dialogue I've seen in any instance of any entertainment medium in my life. But that's just my opinion.

6. The music is ineffective and uninspired. It never seems to fit or enhance the mood at any point in the game, which is a shame because it's something Diablo III's predecessors did very well.

The game feels like an incoherent collection of systems that are nowhere near reaching their potential. It's still kinda fun. It's also kinda sad.