I should have listened to my gut... I was hesitant to spend the money on this remake, but somehow I let my curiosity get the better of me and the temptation was too strong. Playing season after season of Diablo III, it was time for something new. The fans were ready, we have been asking for Diablo IV for years. Instead, in their infinite wisdom what does Blizzard give us?
A remake of Diablo II...
Don't get me wrong, Diablo II was awesome. I probably have just as many hours logged on that game as I do on Diablo III. In my younger years, one of my good friends used to come over pretty much every Thursday night. He would bring his laptop and I had mine. We would drink a little drink, smoke a little smoke, watch movies and play Diablo II in a sort of mini LAN party environment. It was awesome.
I remember when the Lord of Destruction expansion came out. Everyone would just hang out in the public chat waiting for an Areat or Baal slot to open so they could snag some easy loot and power level their toons. It was a pretty awesome time in the world of gaming.
I have zero doubt that the team at Blizzard put a ton of work into remastering Diablo II. As you will see from the shots I am going to share the graphics are pretty spectacular. Especially when you compare them to the original game.
Besides the graphics and a couple other things, this just feels like more of the same quite honestly.
I love the fact that you can play in offline mode. That is something that wasn't available in Diablo III to everyone's frustration and annoyance.
Before you can even get into the game, Blizzard walks you through some display and gamma settings to make sure things look just the way they intended. It becomes obvious fairly quickly that the graphics were their sole concern with this reboot.
There were a couple of different options for purchase with Diablo II Resurrected (D2R). You can either buy D2R for $39.99, D2R Full for $59.99 which includes D2R, D3, and some cosmetic affixes for D3, and finally if you already owned D3, you could get the D2R Upgrade which gives you a $10 discount on the Full version for $49.99.
You probably won't be surprised based on the beginning of this post that I feel like I really overpaid spending the $39.99. If anything, I think $19.99 is more in line with what they should have charged if not $9.99. Sure, over the next couple of years I will likely get my forty dollars worth out of the game, but right now, I feel a little cheated.
As I said, it is basically the same game from D2 + the Lord of Destruction expansion pack. All the same classes and mostly the same mechanics.
Remember the base camp? You spend a lot of time here for the first act of the game. As you can see it looks pretty snazzy these days. I really like what they have done with the place.
Especially when you consider the graphics used to look like this... It's kind of like going from your Nintendo to the PS5, at least as far as the graphics are concerned.
One of the improvements I do enjoy is the fact that they made gold auto pick-up now. It saves you from some of the clicking that you have to do. Since you are mostly mashing the mouse button to destroy mobs, it gives you a nice break to not have to click on every pile of gold as well.
As you can see, the spell graphics are pretty sweet for my sorceress. The fireballs actually look a lot like fireballs. At least so far I do feel like all of the moveable rocks and logs that lay on the ground have a lower spawn rate than they did in the original. I might have just had a crappy seed world for my first game though.
Ah Town Portal, still looking as good as ever! It can really save your bacon in a pinch, so make sure you have some scrolls or a tome on hand...
Bottom line, am I going to play Diablo II Resurrected and likely enjoy my time doing it? Yes. Do I think it is worth the current price for some updated cinematics, cut scenes and game graphics? No, I really don't. Unless you are a hardcore fan of the original, my best advice is to wait for the price to come down a bit and then snatch this up.
At $20 or less, revisiting the world of Sanctuary would be totally worth it.