Diablo + Hellfire

I've been using mods and hacks to get this game working for 20 years, my friends and I take a night and beat through it again at least once a year. So, sooo happy to see it finally on GOG! This is my personal favorite of the entire Diablo series. Diablo 1 is a child of the original roguelike genre, and I love the "rogue" feel here that I don't get from later games in the Action RPG genre it spawned (games more steeped in story and evolving modern game mechanics, including later Diablo games). I also love the gothic plot, just enough plot to set the mood, not so much that the plot becomes the point, because it's really about exploring the dungeon. It can be unforgiving. When you die you have to get back to your body to recover your gear, sometimes that's a real nightmare (use town portals to lure monsters away from the body, and don't quit the game until you've recovered it). Some monsters don't open doors, use that to your advantage. Remember to repair your equipment, if it breaks it's gone forever and it it really sucks to lose that prized item because you put off repairs. Especially if you're the Rogue character because every shot damages the bow a little bit. Randomness matters too. You only have the spells you find and that can change the entire game. Multiplayer takes about 10 hours, you can beat it in one weekend (or one night like we do). That makes it ideal for a long night of gaming with friends. It's balanced best for 2-3 players, with 4 you'll slowly become under-powered. Even with three players we sometimes restart the server and replay from the catacombs if the caves or hell are too difficult. Even with those replays 10 hours is about right though. Finally, yes the interface is dated. You have to navigate text-based menus with the keyboard when you talk to NPCs and things like that, but once you get used to it it's not bad at all. If you want an old school roguelike dungeon crawl I can't recommend it highly enough.

Zum Spiel selbst braucht man nicht viel zu sagen, ein zeitloser Klassiker eben. Knackiger Schwierigkeitsgrad (bzw. 3 Stück davon), Grafik, die damals der Hammer war, guter Sound und die Musik von Herrn Uelmen, die heute man heute noch gerne hört. Das die Steuerung nicht so einfach ist wie bei aktuellen Spielen, nun, das ist nunmal so mit Klassikern, Oldies und Retrospielen. Nicht immer kann es so umgesetzt werden wie bei Monkey Island 1 & 2 oder Day of the tentacle... Dafür spielt man es doch aber auch, weil es damals eben so war und man es so kennengelernt hat und in Erinnerung hat. @ Grek1 und siebzigerfan: Diablo 1 ist nicht ursprünglich deutsch gewesen, sondern schon immer englisch ! Es gibt eine 4 sprachige Playstation 1 Version wo deutsch zur Auswahl steht. Die PC-Version gab es nie in deutsch !!! Das einzige was damals deutsch dran war, war das Handbuch (steht noch original so hier bei mir im Regal), also kann man GOG schonmal gar nicht vorwerfen sie hätten an der Sprache was geändert. Und nur in deutsch übersetzte Spiele, weil wir ja hier in Deutschland sind, kann, gerade bei Klassikern (die früher nunmal sehr oft nur in einer Sprache erschienen), nicht vorausgesetzt werden. Seid doch froh das es das game nun unabhängig und DRM frei gibt und ihr es für kleines Geld erneut spielen könnt... In diesem Sinne, stay a while and listen...

Plain and simple must have. By supporting games like this on GoG.com we create opportunity for more releases of similar games DRM-free on GoG.com. Support GoG.com for great job and hearing us.

Diablo 1 doesn't need a review. It's a fantastic game, worthy of five stars in its own right. But the GoG release is weak, at best, for which I'm knocking this down to three stars. High Resolution is just a blurry up-scale; there's no change to the zoom level of gameplay, and Battle.Net isn't available. IPXWrapper is provided for TCP/IP play, and there's no STUN support for NAT traversal. You'll have to configure ports on your router like it's still 1998. In terms of quality of life improvements there's virtually none to be found. You'll be clicking as much as you were in the original. Speech bubbles don't appear over characters who want to talk to you. Item names don't appear for pickups. And so on and so forth. If you already own Diablo then give this a skip and pick up Belzebub/TheHell/HellfireEnhanced/Infernity and enjoy the superior DDraw modes that they provide.

Frankly, I like this better than Diablo 2, which for me has become a grindfest for known items. This first game feels more like an adventure, and not like item shopping. It has a dark atmosphere, a sense of danger, and less of a sense of the player's eventual invincibility. Not being able to run, while inconvenient, adds to the tension.