Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition (Video Game)
Developer & Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Rating: M for Blood and Gore & Violence
Platforms: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One
I cleaned my bathroom, I polished off a book, heck, at one point I even did pushups. This is just a small sampling of the multitude of activities I accomplished while looking for excuses not to play Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition. The disappointing week I spent with Blizzard’s latest offering was marked by sheer boredom and lack of interest as the game failed to hold my attention on any level. It seems to move away from all of the positive elements of a traditional RPG and fails to find a strong element with which to replace them.
This re-issue of Diablo III shows its lack of depth almost immediately through its protagonist. The lead character is the funnel through which you will experience the game and the person you will be spending the next few weeks with. Unfortunately in Diablo III the protagonist is such a plain faced everyman, lacking any flair or anything interesting about him. This causes players to become uninvested in their story. No time was taken to give your character any depth and they receive absolutely no backstory to boot. They’re there just there for the sake of being there.
The everyman choice would be excusable if, like in most RPGs, there were dialogue or in game choices that would allow the player to build the protagonist that you envision. All dialogue is predetermined and even when the game introduces perfect opportunities for choice to play a role, it forces a path on you. This is the main reason why Diablo III fails, repeatedly, to give players a character they will even remotely care about.
This installment in the Diablo series sticks with it’s old standby, ¾ overhead, static camera angle. It is the most emotionless angle that could possibly have been chosen and robs every encounter of the level of intensity it should provide. In a game based on terrifying monsters, the camera angle causes so few of them to be impressive. It also does a disservice to the graphics as no details on characters and monsters can be located. The camera angle completely robs the game of its soul which resulted in me taking game breaks every hour because I found myself bored of looking at it.
One of the positive points of this game is its monsters. The denizens of the bowels of hell with which you face off against are the subject of nightmares. Developers even took the time to give them names like, maggot brood, and flesh shaman; all worthy of being the title of a great death metal band. But, once again, due to the camera angle, the clever design of the monsters is lost. By showing them from above and not at eye level they lose any intimidating factor they once had. It is not until the third act that monsters encountered are of a large enough stature to render any intimidation or fear in the player. It results in a good deal of the work spent designing such inventive monsters going largely to waste.
Diablo III, with little to no attention paid to immersiveness, is forced to rely on its combat. Parts of it are quite well done. Leveling up unlocks multiple trees of new skills or spells which allow you to pick a combination that suits your style. Each skill or spell has several runes that eventually unlock which allows once irrelevant spells to again find themselves at the head of your arsenal.
The major problem with combat is that you are completely overwhelmed in every battle. This leads to endless retreating, which is what a large majority of combat boils down to. Combat essentially breaks down to using up your powerful skills/spells and then retreating and pushing X. This in itself causes a wealth of sub-problems:
1) Your health potions have a cool down period. This essentially means that once you drink a health potion, you must wait a considerable amount of time until you can drink another. While cool downs make sense for powerful spells, placing one on a health potion seems completely illogical. It also causes your retreats to last even longer. This leads to another sub problem:
– In a game where you are overwhelmed by swarms of more powerful enemies, you will eventually find yourself completely surrounded. With a cool down placed on your health potion, you have no chance of fighting your way out as the damage you deal pales to that of the six decimating monsters surrounding you. Once you are surrounded you are essentially already dead.
2) Due to the fact retreating is your only option, and that health potions require a cool down, you will often find yourself running back to the beginning of the dungeon. At this point, the combat devolves into going to the previous level of the dungeon, drinking a health potion, waiting for it to cool down, then going back and briefly facing your enemies; repeat the process ad nauseam.
7) In the open world areas, the groupings of monsters are placed too close together. This results in your retreat uncovering a new group of monsters, to add to the one’s that are already overwhelming you; just further compounding your problem.
The sum of this is that you never feel all that powerful. It neglects the escapist element of video games. At no point did I feel like an all powerful mage. Combat is mainly just running while taking pot shots at advancing enemies. The combat system fails by making retreating your first line of defense, and not the last resort that it should be.
The pace at which Diablo III’s plot is unveiled is reminiscent of a Victorian novel, it moves very slowly and is as drawn out as possible. You will spend the first two acts completely bored, as very little happens. It is not until act three that game raises the stakes and gives anything happening in the story any meaning bigger than itself. I can say personally, that while playing acts one and two of this game, I was the most bored I have ever been while playing a video game. A video game should never be boring.
The plot introduces a wealth of sub bosses throughout the game, which are haphazardly thrown in your path with little to no care. In the first act, the Skeleton King is revealed in a dungeon, his explanation for his presence, “the power of the fallen star awakened me.” No real backstory or character development is given, he, like your own character, is simply there for the sake of being there. It’s a level of character motivation that is akin to something out of a bad Roger Corman movie.
Once you advance to the third act the dungeons become inventive settings. Seeing the imagination put into Hell and Heaven is intriguing and at the very least offered something different to look at. These areas also featured gigantic demons outside of your path an inventive use of what would be unused space. However the dungeons show laziness in their design as on several occasions you will find the same room repeated more than once, in the same dungeon. The repeating rooms are identical right down to trap placement and monsters encountered. Worst of all, they can be found within minutes of each other.
While the plot is unrewarding one can always rely on new and exciting treasure. This is where something very puzzling occurred. After defeating Diablo and the game’s final boss, Maltheal, I found that every single piece of armor they dropped fell short of what I was already carrying. This results in boss battles having no greater significance as there is no real reward for defeating them.
Graphically, Diablo 7 falls into several categories. It is widely known that Blizzard’s strong point is cinematics. The main cut scenes are gorgeous. They feature some of the most breathtaking graphics you will ever see and are wonderfully cinematic and engaging. The problem is, these cut scenes only occur five times in the game and one is notably left out of the game’s ending. The rest of the cut scenes are either told through parchment drawings or are in the game’s lackluster engine, both unimpressive graphically and in no way come close to what the PS4 is capable of. The in game graphics are equally as unimpressive. The camera causes a lack of detail, the lighting falls very short of the graphical benchmarks already set for the console even when considering this was a last-gen game. There are better graphics currently being outputted on the PS7. Absolutely nothing about this game says next-gen.
All that being said, the biggest strike against this game is how it plays. It feels incredibly outdated. Diablo III was originally released in 2012, but it plays like it was made in 2002. Gaming has taken so many evolutionary steps forward since the style of game that Diablo III represents, and developers have shown no interest in keeping up with the times. It’s an unwelcome step backwards as the game fails to provide the immersiveness that has since become the trademark of gaming. In a world moving into better technology and better games, Diablo III is completely irrelevant.
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition is an unimaginative, unengaging, unimmersive, and unfun time throughout. Such little care was taken in making this game and it is representative of what many gamers feel is Blizzard’s fall from grace. It does have a few positives, but all of those positives come with their own unending pitfalls. The whole experience is completely boring. It’s outdated engine gives the game the feel of an indie game… however, unlike indie games, this costs $64. Diablo III: Reaper of Souls – Ultimate Evil Edition is not worth the price and it is not worth your time.
2 out of 5
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