The opening area is a dark, narrow set of cooridors set in a monotone reddish brown hue. If you can make it out, because it's so dark. Make a wrong turn and you're on fire. Make another wrong turn and you've got a tutorial window that halts gameplay with a timed visual. Disable the tutorials and there's little indication that you're progressing. Did the developers even play their game?
Yes, it's a GTA clone, from the height of the genre's popularity. But don't let that dissuade you: this has charm, character and story that can't be matched by any other title in the genre. The passion and dedication given to make the world believable is obvious, and the writing will suck you in.
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.
It's been a long time since I doggedly played through an RPG with every free minute I could find in a day; and yet here I am, saddened that I've completed the game. It's a fantastic sequel in the tradition of Baldur's Gate 2: a continuation of a story you love, with the characters you recognize, but with just so much more to see and do.
Incredibly repetitive and with a deep focus on repeat-until-the-timing-is-perfect. The sound track is decent, the voice overs are hokey as hell, and the visuals are satisfactory. If you enjoy training your muscle memory to match the animation timings of a particular boss then this is for you.
