Using a completely fresh character, Wizard class, on Hard difficulty (Accidentally on Normal til after Butcher) to give this a fair assessment. No pre-spent Paragon Points to assist me, although definitely not as a rule. I’m just assuming it is balanced outside of it.
The Contrast takes a nosedive, and although not unpleasant, not to any nostalgic benefit so far. But you do get to walk everywhere all super-duper slow! And alongside your slick new walking animation and static sprite background, you get to listen to Tristram’s Theme. (Duh.)
Walking around, you’ll find various classic characters like Griswold and Farnham in the form of corpses. I imagine we ignore for now. Walking down the northern path into Labyrinth Level 1, swapping out my wand for the Solid Short Sword found from the corpse outside, because D3 logic.
So far, it’s D3 with a new walk, and pseudo-1999 filter. And my Objective is “Slay The Dark Lord”.
Well, sheesh. I’ll uhh, see what I can do, I guess.
I can’t help but feel like i’m playing SNES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, over Diablo 1. I remember Diablo 1 being distinctively more scary and difficult. But so far, this is far too zany and whimsical, exploding the screen with pretty colors after each cast of my frostbeam and arcane orbs.
But then I found the Butcher, and things became a lot less zany;
And a lot less whimsical;
Was a cool little fight. But too easy. Re-checking the difficulty settings, I was on Normal the whole time. Though unless his mechanics change according to difficulty, i’ll imagine he’s easy either way.
Now with the Hard difficulty checked, i’m off to the King Leoric area. Again, it’s a neat little area, but the fight hardly poses any challenge. Basically kill hordes of skeletons as Leoric proceeds to miss all his attacks. And eventually;
Now so far, i’ve gotten a couple pieces of shiny gear, though nothing to write home about. I did end up getting a Legendary 2h mace “Crushbane”, and although it makes my Wizard look a little silly, It essentially doubles my damage. For me though, this is about the casual experience. I imagine every kind of player can get his fix, though I won’t get too in depth about gear or numbers.
I was very intrigued about the skill “Energy Twister”, and it turned out to be pretty disappointing. Drained about 1/3rd mana, and proceeded to tickle the monsters that it managed to hit. I do not recommend that skill.
Going into the Chamber of Bone, managed to get a good laugh at a boding monologue, threatening “Eternal Death” at those that would steal its treasure. At first ‘Eternal’ makes it sound worse, then just humorously redundant.
Around the 7th level of the Labyrinth, you finally start feeling threatened. Acid Beasts projectiles were hitting me for about a quarter total life, and it wasn’t uncommon needing to dodge a few of them at once. I’ve run into The Halls of the Blind, which is essentially just a dark area with blink-like monsters (but when you have a wizard lugging around a giant mace called ‘Crushbane’, you can’t help but feel the enemies are the true underdogs)
Labyrinth Level 8 was my first death, after being zerged by these hulking dudes, but I could just revive where I was. I’m struggling to understand why I even bother having a healthbar at this point.
I enjoyed seeing this guy, though he was less dangerous than the trash mob before him, which was disappointing.
I’ll be totally honest, at this point it felt like I tripped into Level 9, and fell my way down to Level 15. Not much to report, I upgraded some gear, killed some baddies until I could finally just rmb the classic Diablo to death in a very mundane final fight, of which I decided to let you fully experience with me via video. Try not to fall asleep, and the cringy face-tanking is intentional;
TL;DR It was a decent run-through, and somewhat worth the time, but definitely could have been more. Is it any reason to go buy D3ROS? No. And I gotta say, that was plenty of D3 for me. You won’t find me purchasing The Rise of the Necromancer pack.
