Awesome, for a certain type of player
My reason for writing this review is to try and let players know what they're getting into before investing hours of gameplay and, potentially, hitting a wall like I did.
I did play Diablo back in the day as well as Diablo 2. I have now played Belzebub with two different character classes (assassin, necromancer) to the final level on Normal difficulty.
I, too, felt like I was playing 'Diablo 1.5'. Belzebub incorporates many of D2's gameplay elements and changes into D1. It brings many, many new / restored features and I couldn't possibly go into detail on all of them. From what I've seen most of them work very well. The creators of this mod deserve a ton of respect.
There is one signifant change in particular that I will mention here because it was one my reasons to eventually stop playing, and it's imho not obvious from most feature lists. With Belzebub, levels are randomly generated each time you load a game. After loading, you always start in Tristram. There are 'waypoints' on every two levels that you have to manually reach and activate to be able to later return to that level. This is very much like D2 handled it.
This change alone had massive implications for how I'd play the game. Fully exploring a level can very easily take more than an hour, and much more if you want to complete sidequests along the way. I think it is fair to say that to play Belzebub in any meaningful way, you have to have a lot more time at your disposal than what was necessary for the original D1. For example, you could play vanilla D1 for half an hour, save the game somewhere midway through level 9 and continue right there tomorrow. With Belzebub, you'd reload back in Tristram and would have to teleport to the waypoint on level 8, which is now completely reset and randomized so you may have to play through it all over again just to get back to level 9, which is now also completely reset and randomized again. Often I found myself trying to beeline for the next waypoint to activate just so I could stop playing for the day without having made no progress.
What killed it for me in the end, though, was a sudden, massive spike in difficulty upon getting to the final level ('Terror Domain') on Normal difficulty. I encountered this with both characters. Up to that point, both characters were doing rather well and capable of defeating all mobs and bosses without the game feeling too easy. There are several bosses on Terror Domain, and both my characters were suddenly hopelessly outmatched against the first and the second boss, respectively. In other words, yes, I haven't even encountered Diablo yet. I had to use weird tactics involving the Teleport and Town Portal spells to beat that one boss, so it didn't even feel challenging or rewarding, just plain silly. And yes, I did try different spells, items, what have you. I'm sure with a lot of grinding both characters could eventually beat those bosses and Normal difficulty. But man do I have better things to do with my life!
So here is my conclusion. If you can live with (or even like) the map reset every time you reload a character, Belzebub is probably going to be a lot of fun for anyone who enjoyed D1 and D2, up to the final level on Normal difficulty. From that point on, however, Belzebub seems sharply geared towards hardcore players with a lot of spare time on their hands and a willingness to grind up their characters' XP and items.
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