izigame.me

Full Disclaimer: this is the perspective of someone with over 5k hours in Path of Exile, which I consider one of the best games ever made. I also have a shitton of hours in Diablo 2, but never got around to play Diablo 3 (probably will in the near future). This review is based on Diablo Season 6, which was my first season played.
Diablo 4 is an exile-like ARPG, or at least marketed as such. It tries to be closer to the Diablo 2 formula than its predecessor, which is a good thing in my opinion. The gritty atmosphere of the older Diablo games is certainly there, and the combat feels just as good, but more modern and polished.
When talking about Diablo today, we have to keep in mind the intended audience - casual ARPG players and people getting introduced to the genre. It is supposed to be simple enough so that anyone can just pick and play, while being interesting and challenging enough to keep people engaged through the game. I think it is fair to say that it accomplishes that - for the most part, at least.
The campaign is certainly one of the best in the genre, with the strong Diablo lore and Blizzard cinematics behind it. The final fight with Lilith feels very epic, a great ending to a great campaign. The fact that you can change difficulty levels during the campaign adds a lot to the challenge for those brave enough and makes it possible for the "dad gamers" out there to also enjoy playing without sweating too much.
The endgame is where most of the problems reside, especially from a Path of Exile veteran perspective. It starts well - right out of the campaign (or even during it for some), you have access to many mechanics such as Helltide, Pit, Infernal Horde, Nightmare Dungeon, Dark Citadel, Underground City and can even try your luck killing World Bosses and Pinnacle Bosses. You will reach Torment 1 very soon and can go up to Torment 4, increasing the difficulty and the reward of the content. Going up the torment levels does feel like a challenge, at least if you're not using a broken class (looking at you Spiritborne).
However, once you get strong enough to reach Torment 4 and start exploding screens of monsters without too much trouble, the endgame problems become apparent. There is not a way to scale the mechanics apart from the Torment level - excluding the Pit, which has its own scaling. And the Pit is the best place to farm just about everything, so you will probably spend most of your time there if you're trying to minmax, which many ARPG players do. Everything starts to feel samey and the bosses start to die in a single frame, being more of a loot pinata than a fight. You will soon realize that it is better to save your resources and do rotas than to use them by yourself, which I believe is less fun for the majority of players. The crafting starts to feel very shallow, and there is no real way to scale your power apart from getting lucky on drops or using a 3rd party site to buy things via trade. Honestly, once you reach this stage is better to move on until the next season or reroll a new class.
Overall, Diablo 4 is a very good single player game, but fails as an online game with an economy where balance should be taken seriously and endgame should be more meaningful. If you're the type of player that have very limited hours to play, takes quite a while to reach the endgame and don't really engage with trade and min-maxing you will have a very good time. If you're in as a power gamer looking for the complexity and replayability that an ARPG can offer, it is best to look elsewhere for now. If you're in the middle, the campaign is still totally worth as a standalone game and you can maybe come back every now and again to play a new class or test a new build.


The Good

+ The campaign is outstanding, main story is engaging and most cinematics are very well-polished
+ Graphics, sound effects and music all blends very well into the game - the Diablo look and feel is still there
+ Character customization is great, I feel no need to buy MTX since we can easily customize our appearance by salvaging gear
+ The combat in general feels good, controls feels responsive and most abilities feels satisfying to use
+ The paragon system is a good way to keep slowly scaling your character even after reaching the endgame
+ Many systems to keep the game fresh until you reach the later parts of endgame like Helltide, Pit, Infernal Horde, Nightmare Dungeon, Dark Citadel, Underground City, World Bosses, Pinnacle Bosses
+ The bosses can be fun and engaging, especially when they don't die in 1 frame (which tend to happen very early, unfortunately)
+ The fact that mythical uniques have to be earned and can't be traded is a good thing
+ The option to skip campaign after doing it at least once is much appreciated


The Neutral

* No official SSF mode (no trading), for a game that is clearly better played as a single-player game this would be huge
* Side quests are just uninspired fetch quests most of the time and feel like a chore, unlike the main quests
* Crafting is too basic, which is fine for a casual gamer but lacks depth and stops being engaging after a while
* Power creep is through the roof, after the campaign you can trivialize all content very fast with a decent build, even in Torment 4 (apart from high lvl Pits)


The Bad

- Game crashes a lot, and its not a hardware problem since I have a top-end computer and it's the only game to do so
- When the game crashes or you exit the game you automatically lose all your current buffs (elixirs/incenses/etc). With the amount of crashes this means that you will be reapplying those buffs a lot and being angry every time it happens
- Replayability is poor for an ARPG, the endgame systems are limited and you can't really scale most of them
- As of now, the Pit is the best source of XP/Obols/Gear, so no reason to do anything else unless you need Obducite
- The way you are forced to do "rotas" if you want to be efficient with your materials is very off-putting. At least there is a party finder in the game, which helps, but being almost forced into multiplayer in a single-player game feels really bad
- Snapshotting is a big balancing problem, and very unfun to use most of the time
- Many many balancing issues with the game - when you have a class that does literally millions of times the damage of any other class, you have failed (looking at you Spiritborne)
- There is trade in your game but no trade support? Not even an official trade site?
- Too few stash tabs. This is a paid game, not some free to play where the monetization comes from extra stash tabs, no reason to give us only 6, especially with the introduction of runes using a lot of inventory space
- Too few character slots. Even F2P games like Path of Exile gives more than 15 character slots from the get go, why not a paid game? Especially considering the fact that we need many "mule" characters since the stash tabs are not enough for storage
- The skill tree is too basic while the paragon board is too convoluted in a bad way while not offering any real choices apart from which glyphs to use, limiting build diversity and shoehorning characters into pre-envisioned archetypes
D4Bad XDD
7 / 10 - IGN