More dungeon crawling, deadlier monsters and fantastic magical weapons. Diablo is back!

Story

Diablo, the Lord of Terror was once defeated by a great champion who faced the greatest horrors of hell. In an attempt to contain Diablo’s inner soul, the champion took the soul stone and drove it into his own forehead. Diablo’s soul would not submit that easily though, and instead the great champion became obsessed by the devil, and soon he set out to release his brothers Mephisto, Lord of Hatred and Baal, Lord of Destruction. Now in the path of corruption caused by Diablo, new heroes emerge to stop the corruption and evil once and for all.

Introduction

Diablo II is a dark fantasy dungeon crawling roleplaying game played from an isometric top-down view. This official expansion named Lord of Destruction adds two new playable classes, new dungeons, items and monsters. Simply put, more of everything that made the original game so addicting and enjoyable. The expansion uplifts the game in many significant ways and should be considered mandatory in order to enjoy the game to its fullest.

The Game

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is in many ways a perfect dungeon crawling marathon. You go on various quests, which are typically straightforward and you set out into the unknown to slay beasts and hordes of evil minions. During your exploits you will find random generated weapons and armor to further increase your abilities and you gain experience points which leads to increased skills and learning new skills as your character levels up.

As with its predecessor Diablo, you have a very limited inventory space and the loot you find will fill it up in no time. This creates a gameplay loop of getting loot, returning to town to sell off the excess, repair your equipment and start the process over.

Controls

The controls have improved significantly from the first Diablo game. You still use hotkeys on the keyboard for drinking potions, as well as selecting which skills or spells you want to use. Attacking is done through clicking (or holding) the left mouse button and spells are cast with the right mouse button. It certainly has a learning curve, but given some time and practice it will feel natural and fluid.

It should be mentioned that this is the only game so far that has given me pains in the hand from clicking on the mouse too much.

Content

In Diablo II: Lord of Destruction you can choose to play as any of the seven available classes; Assassin, Amazon, Necromancer, Paladin, Barbarian, Sorceress or Druid. Each class has their own strengths, weaknesses, unique skills, abilities and spells. They vary greatly in what play styles they excel at and there is plenty room for experimentation according to your own tastes and preferences. Depending on which skills you choose to level up you’ll have very varying chances to manage the later parts of the game.

The game appears to grow the more you play – the further you get the more will you discover in terms of items and skills. When you finally beat the game, you’ll unlock the nightmare difficulty, and when you beat that you will unlock the hell difficulty. This is where the real challenge lies. Only then will you be able to find the real treasures of this game – the really good items – and you will need them, because the difficulty level at this point requires you to have an optimized character!

You’ll explore many different types of dungeons set in many different types of locations. There’s the corrupted monastery, the jail, various caverns, tombs, temples, sewer systems, hell’s citadel, ice caves, forests and wastelands among others. These dungeons are filled with monsters and you’ll need to hack your way through them. What makes Diablo II unique is that the dungeons are randomly generated each time you play the game. The monsters and items are also randomly placed and generated, so the challenges you face can vary wildly. For example, some monsters have the ability to strengthen monsters around them in various ways; typically by giving them immunity to certain types of attacks. If you’re unlucky you’ll meet monsters who are immune to several types of attacks, which could mean that your character will have a tough time fighting against them.

Diablo II has a few grave flaws. The most obvious one is that the different classes aren’t balanced at all. The more monsters you can kill in the shortest time possible, the better your character is. For example, if you play as the Amazon, and choose to use a bow or crossbow as your weapon you are at a great disadvantage, simply because you won’t be able to kill enemies efficiently enough.

There are many skills in the game that are totally useless, and some skills are totally necessary, which skews the balance in the game. If you picked the wrong skills, you really won’t be able to manage on the hell difficulty – the monsters there are just too tough.

Another flaw is that the game is kind of exploitable. You can’t hope to reach the higher levels without exploiting the game, namely defeat Baal’s minions repeated times in a full multiplayer game. This will reward you with a large amount of experience points in a very short amount of time. This way you can reach level 70-80 in a day or two, and should you try to reach these levels in an “honest” way, you’d need to play the game for weeks! Should you play alone, you’d need months of grinding to reach these levels.

Like I said, if you happen to pick the wrong skills for your character and find out the hard way that your character can’t survive and defeat the monsters in the hell difficulty, there really isn’t much you can do but to create a new character. There is no way to reset your allocated skill points and re-allocate them on new skills.

Dying makes you lose experience points permanently, so you can lose those hard-earned experience points. This becomes a factor later in the game where building up the experience points to reach the next level becomes harder and harder. You can’t however, lose a character level.

Since the bosses have better chances to drop rare magic items, the game really encourages killing the same boss over and over again. This kills much of the pleasure of just wandering around killing random monsters hoping to find some powerful items, because the bosses do drop such items more often. And to be honest, killing the same boss over and over gets boring after a while.

Rare items to look out for are the jewels that can add special effects to your weapons and armor, and rune stones that are used to create specific rune-weapons and rune-armor which are among the better items in the game.

The game has some cool features such as hiring henchmen and equipping them, crafting items by combining materials in the magic Horadric Cube and secret levels. There’s much to discover and millions of monsters to defeat. You’ll keep finding better and better items the more you play which works as a strong incentive to keep playing, and it’s hard to stop because you know that eventually you’ll find something that will make you that much stronger. In many ways the game is designed in a genius way – it’s addictive and playing together with a friend can easily become very engrossing. At least if you like these kinds of games.

If you indeed beat the game and think you are hardcore – there’s the hardcore mode. This will require you to create a new character and play with the hardcore rules. This simply means that if you die, your character is permanently dead. This is a great extra challenge and can either work as a “pick up and play” type of game mode or a serious attempt to try to beat the game without dying. Having a high level hardcore character is always worthy of some bragging rights!

Multiplayer

The multiplayer is of course where this game shines. You can explore the dungeons together with other players, trade items and even duel with each other. The game scales up its difficulty dynamically as more players join the same game. Eight people can adventure together and you can even play on entirely different maps, separately.

Treasures that drop are free for all, so whomever picks it up first is the one who gets to keep it (unless they drop it from their inventory, of course). As you can imagine, this creates a dog-eat-dog kind of situation over contested and desired items.

The variety and diversity that this game has makes for excellent replay value. We spent more than a year playing this in multiplayer, basically every day, before we finally got tired of it! At that point we had several high level characters, found some of the rarest items (but not all!), built multiple sets of high tier rune socket equipment, and at one point we were ranked 11^th place on the multiplayer ladder for the EU West server.

Of course, the multiplayer aspect also attracts its fair share of cheaters. We’ve seen automated bots playing, duplicated weapons and scripts that can instantly pick up specific items when dropped. The server administrators occasionally purge items that they think are not legit – yes, we’ve had one of our items (perfectly legit!) destroyed in this manner.

Graphics

The graphics are built on a 2D engine, with some effects that add some 3D feel to it. The game has some clever lighting effects, which makes the dungeons look appropriately dark. The characters and monsters look a bit grainy, but generally it’s alright. The different monster types are recycled multiple times with color variations across the three difficulty levels.

This is by no means the best looking game out there, much depending on the low screen resolution that is supported, but it has a dynamic feel to it and there is much to see here. The art style is very consistent throughout the whole game, which feels just right as you explore the various environments.

Sound

The sound has a very high standard – the sound effects are a pleasure to hear, at least for the first few hours. Since this is a game that you can play for hours and hours, you’ll probably turn the sound off as it gets insanely repetitive after a while. The music is cinematic and pretty much blends well into the rest of the atmosphere. There is great voice acting in there as well both from the NPCs and the monsters you fight. Overall very high production value.

Summary

Diablo II: Lords of Destruction is a timeless game, despite its flaws. You can play the game casually or sink days and nights into it – either way you’re pretty much guaranteed to enjoy your time. It beautifully adapts to your skill and there’s always a new challenge waiting around the next corner.

This game was ranked the most anticipated title before its release, and it was rightly so – this is a classic that has a lot of content and high quality dungeon crawling action!

Developed By: Blizzard North
Published By: Blizzard Entertainment
Version Reviewed: Windows PC
Genre: Roleplaying
Players: 1-8
Also Available On: mac OS
Released: 2001-06-29