Diablo 2: Revival of Risen (PS5)

The effect of the loot game is a creeping obsession that we all have to struggle with from time to time. Click on. Click on. Click on. A few more enemies. Click on. Click on. Click on. Maybe another dungeon. Click on. Click on. Click on. Might as well redo the whole game once more. Click on. You get it. You’ve played games like this, maybe even its sequel and predecessor, the always wonderful Diablo 3.

Now here is its much-heralded and illustrious ancestor, surprisingly titled Diablo 2 – Resurrected and Remastered, nothing less. And the clicks above have been replaced, of course, with taps. Or thumbs, or pushes, or squeezes, or whatever onomatopoeia you like to use to push buttons – since that’s the lion’s share of what you’ll be doing here. Approach monsters, then press buttons. Hit them to drop and grant you XP. Explode them with magic. You already know; we have all walked this land before. Figuratively or literally, if you played the original game on PC.

If indeed you are lucky enough to have done so, you will be perfectly at ease with this edition of Risen. After all, it’s just Diablo 2 as you remember it, warts and everything. It’s been improved in some ways, we’ll get to that, but basically it’s the same game you might be playing since 2000. That’s a good thing, if that’s what you want; an uncompromising and polished port of an action RPG classic. The real question, however, is whether Diablo 2 – as much as it is a classic of the genre – is still worth playing in the Year of Our Lord 2021. And that’s with that question. that things are starting to get a little muddled.

On the control side, it’s pretty impressive. The interface has been beautifully transplanted to the console and the allocation of skill points (and, indeed, the skills unlocked afterwards) is extremely simple and efficient. Moves around the maps are fast, the attack is responsive enough, and nothing in the mechanics of the meat and potatoes gets in the way of the player, which is precisely what loot games should look like; they are in fact a conveyor belt of thing and the last thing you want is a weird design choice putting a wrench in the works. In this case, some kind of legendary key +3, no.

The inventory and the way it is managed is a bit of a mixed bag. Managing it is generally good, even if the space allotted to you seems a little tight. It is in the sale of your gradually outdated merchandise that we have encountered the frustration. On the one hand, regularly using your portals to return to town and unload the crap you found creates a pleasantly numbing little loop of admittedly satisfying hiding-cleaning, but on the other hand, it’s pretty repetitive.

There are no torchlight pets to carry your loot for you, everything is manual. The ritualistic nature of this action suits the game to some extent, as it is quite similar in design. There’s a real boxy skinner feel to this genre – that’s not a bad thing. He is convincing in his arduousness. It sounds like some kind of backwards compliment – it isn’t. To appreciate the likes of Diablo 2, it’s important to note that for viewers, it’s not much more complex than even the original Gauntlet. It is in your specifications, your builds, your choices of character class, that it begins to stand out. Not to mention the multiplayer.

Said multiplayer is present and correct here, with online and offline characters completely isolated from each other. This is a bit of a shame as it means that you can’t get this high level offline necromancer online under any circumstances, but that is the fairness we assume. Connection issues didn’t really bother us other than the initial startup issues before and after launch. It was easy to launch a game with friends, and any lag or stutter we encountered was very minimal. Indeed, it’s a great way to play Diablo 2 – some classes complement each other very well – but we think its atmosphere is best served as a lone hero fighting overwhelming hordes of darkness.

Visually, it’s a bit bright. You have the option of a performance mode and we strongly suggest that you turn it on, as the 60fps locked out compensates for tiny graphics gaps. We played in this mode all along and the game looked Great; it looks like everything we could ask for has been done. The spells look spectacular, the environments are strongly atmospheric, and the monsters, above all, look suitably wicked. Some will complain that there is a minor loss of personality in some of the choices – Diablo is a campy game, and the loss of some more vivid hues of color and some modified monster poses reduce that aspect of the experience a bit. This is, however, the definition of nit-picking, as Vicarious Visions did a remarkable job recreating a classic here.

The music is still wonderful, ditto to the different “aargh!” of the monster as they are dispatched, but the storyline is a bit coiled. It might be heresy, but we couldn’t get involved in it, dubbed as they were. You can navigate the text quite efficiently, and this game is all about the gameplay loop, so we mostly went with Continue with that. It’s not a blow to the hard work that went into this – every cutscene has been remade and they look great. We’re just here for the loot.

Conclusion

So this is a very, very good remaster (remake? We don’t know when so much was redone), then, of a rather old loot game that had many subsequent iterations from other developers. Is it worth going back to Diablo 2, ultimately, when the games we’d say are somewhat superior – Titan Quest, the infamous Grim Dawn only on PC … even (controversially, yes) its own sequel in Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition, which packs some brilliant local co-op that Diablo 2 totally (and understandably, given its setting) lacks. As good as Diablo 2 is, it’s unfortunate that on console we’d rather play its follow-up , which seemed more suited to the joypad experience. Diablo 2 is a PC game that has been (brilliant!) Transferred to PS5, but it is still held back a bit by its origins.