Review #164: Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls - Ultimate Edition

 Diablo strikes. Again. Because two beatings weren't enough. Silly Diablo.

 Remember Diablo? It was pretty neat. Remember Diablo 2? Oh boy, did that game improve on everything Diablo did or what?! Now Diablo is back for the third time in an isometric hack-and-slash dungeon crawling RPG. Times have changed, technology has changed and so has Diablo.

 The game takes place 20 years after Diablo, as Deckard Cain and his protegee Leah get involved with a man that fell from the skies, and you, the Nephalem, goes to investigate. Later on, the Minor Evils like Belial and Azmodan get involved, and the Nephalem faces them in battle, culminating in a battle above the heavens against a familiar enemy. The story isn't very good, characters are bland, twists are predictable and the game even leaves the fate of one character hanging after vanilla Diablo(Act IV) which would be terrible if only Act V didn't give it closure... with some very convenient plot devices. On the plus side, the lore behind some of the characters is rather interesting, told via narrated journals that you can find. Ah! Fair warning, I didn't mind it, but the game has a decidedly lighter tone than previous games in the series, there are some rather poor attempts at humor, like a guy trapped in a barrel which is played for laughs,

 Luckily, gameplay's where it's at. All six playable classes feature very different play styles and skills. Skills in this game can get very creative, and they look very good. The core behind hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers is killing enemies and looting corpses for better equipment, pretty hard to screw it up, and they didn't. However, Stores in the game never have any kind of useful equipment to sell, which makes money more or less useless, probably just gonna use it to change the appearance of your armor and weapons(Which is awesome) or repair your equipment. Speaking of repairing, the durability of a weapon is no longer, at least on the console version, told through numbers, you just go to a town and scroll to the "repair" tab to see if anything needs repairing, which is a very... odd decision.

 Some people have expressed their distaste in the game's mainstreaming, but it ain't all bad. There's some really cool features, like having recently picked up equipment show up over your health bar, so that you can equip it without going into the Equipment screen. Another thing I like, is that the game now tells you how much your damage or resistance will increase or decrease, when looking at equipment, through green and red arrows. So if an armor piece has 30 def but +10 vitality bonus and another one has 10 def but +50 vitality bonus, the game will tell you that the latter is a better piece. This kind of mainstreaming is really good, since it cuts back on time trying out equipment and looking at numbers, without dumbing down the system.

 Now, there's some things that I didn't like, for example, when you level up you no longer get stat points to spread around your stats, which sucks. And passive/active skills are now gained through leveling up, so eventually you'll get every skill in the game, I like the more specialized, personalized character builds from before. The game does allow for customization in the form of Runes, each skill has about six runes, and you can equip one of them to change how it works, some change the skill completely(Like changing a beam that falls from the sky into a short-range blast from your character), or give it special properties. I really liked this, as you get a ton of skills to play with. At first, I thought how cool it was that each button on the joystick was tied to a different skillset... turns out you can turn on "Elective Mode" on the Options menu and just equip any skill anywhere, which is also fun, but a different type of fun(Less restrictive... but also less strategic).

 The biggest seller, for me, is how the game plays out. After you are done with the 5-act campaign(Act IV is surprisingly lame, short and rushed, but Act V is, probably, my favorite) you unlock adventure mode. First of all, every time you play the game, the maps and monsters get randomized, which also means that different "events" might or might not appear, making each playthrough different. But that ain't all, Adventure Mode allows you to warp anywhere, even switch between acts, and now you play for bounties, events randomized every time you play. Endless replay value. And I haven't even touched upon Rifts, which produce even more randomized dungeons and harder bosses. If you like this kind of game, there's a ton of reasons to come back over and over, and you can bring up to three buddies with you. On the same console!

 The framerate and loading times were pretty decent... my first time around. I've been reading, and it seems some people are getting tons of freezes... the game only froze once on me, but afterwards the game started having trouble loading stuff for the first time(The first time I use a skill the game will stutter, and so on, but after a couple of minutes it goes back to how it used to run). Also, you can't turn the camera, which would make sense in Multiplayer, but the game is in 3D now, there's no reason not to let you turn the camera in Single Player.

 Visually the game looks phenomenal, sure, models are not the best you've seen on the console, but it's excused due to how much stuff can be going on the screen at the same time while keeping the framerate pretty steady. Characters can look very badass when they get some higher-level equipment(or pay to have it look like that!) and enemies look nice as well. Props to making the objects a joy to destroy, seriously, even if most of them are empty, watching stuff fly in the direction you hit it is always enjoyable. Voice acting is pretty decent, although it seems that they tried a bit too hard with some of the accents. Music... is alright.... when you get to listen to it, most of the time it will get drowned in the sounds of carnage and fallin loot!

 Overall, I enjoyed the hell out of Diablo 3. The story was pretty lame, but story ain't the reason I play videogames(most of the time). Gameplay was almost what I would've wanted, if only they went for a more personalized route, don't get me wrong, runes are pretty neat, but I really miss the personalized stat spread. Still, the way they managed to add so much replayability into the game is commendable.
 9.0 out of 10