You’ll have recruited and trained up CPU-controlled allies, and they’ll be killing monsters by the dozen too. You can start out as a loser with a magic missile or a weedy sword, and after a few hours you’ll be firing death rays into demon mobs or scattering foes with a blow of your hammer like Sauron at the start of Fellowship of the Ring. In fact, it all happens at such a prodigious rate that you might well struggle to keep up.Īll the same, it’s hugely satisfying. As long as you keep slaying the monsters you’ll keep on picking up new magic weapons, learning special attacks or more effective spells and finding new armour. In Diablo III, it’s pretty much relentless. Then you keep killing to find out what your new skills and stuff can do, and the whole cycle of bloodshed and bagging starts again. You kill to earn XP and bag some loot, then level up to gain new powers, pausing to equip the choicest items of equipment as you go. No, the real secret to Diablo III’s allure is that it’s perfected the classic cycle of the action RPG. The narrative is paper-thin in terms of character and plotting, and each twist is nothing more than an excuse to drag you through one wilderness area or dungeon after another – to the extent that you can often forget where you are and what you’re doing there, and simply focus on the ongoing brawl. Yet Blizzard isn’t even attempting to rival Bioware here. There is an overarching storyline to the game’s five acts and we get a handful of colourful villains and the odd big shock. Nor is the story likely to keep you pushing through. There’s a level of strategy involved, but it’s no Dark Souls. The only skills involved are in working out which of your currently equipped skills or attacks is likely to be most effective against the current crop of monsters, making sure you maintain your health and avoiding the heaviest of incoming attacks if you can. Diablo III is full of beautiful scenery and superbly-designed monsters, but there really is very, very little to do except make your way around each maze-like area, battering everything that moves and a few things that look like they might move if you took your eye off them for a second. Why? Well, it’s not the exploration or the combat. This remains one of the most addictive games ever made. And by this point, of course, Diablo III will have you in its grip. Played the PC version? For the first half hour of play the console interface might feel strange, but within an hour or two it’s second nature, and after three or four hours you’ll forget that you ever used a mouse. Even the D-Pad gets a look in, cycling through new loot so you can decide what to keep, what to equip and what to drop. A quick tap of the touch panel summons the Inventory and character screens, while the bumpers take you left and right through pages for managing inventory, skills, followers and quests. Squeeze R2 or hold a pertinent face button and you’ll keep smacking away with the relevant attack until your enemy is out cold. Flick the right stick in any direction and your hero rolls or backsteps out of harm’s way. You can move your hero with the left analogue stick, firing off attacks and spells, ranged weapons and protective moves with the face buttons, bumpers and triggers. With the DualShock 4 in hand, gone are the days of endless clicking. You might find some areas, like selecting skills or managing inventory, where the PC version still comes up trumps, but the biggest surprise of playing this Ultimate Edition is that the PS4 now feels like Diablo’s natural home (the same almost certainly holds true for Xbox One, but we haven’t had that version to check). This is all of Diablo III, with two years’ worth of patches and changes rolled in, plus the additional content and enhancements from the Reaper of Souls expansion, all dolled up with console-friendly controls and matching interface tweaks. It seems like heresy to describe this as the definitive version of Diablo III but – hey – let’s just say it anyway. Available on Xbox One, PS4 (version tested), Xbox 360, PS3
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