![]() ![]() And when a Diablo gets into your system, it's much harder to get it out. There's little consternation about digging into the mechanics of a perfect burger, evangelising its richness and fattiness and glutinousness, because ultimately you can finish a single cheeseburger and move on, your life in balance and your overall health intact. He's not wrong - like any good yuppie I've developed strong feelings about the Maillard Reaction - but where Diablo, and games like it, get a little sticky is when you think about the details. A lot of video games are junk food, ultimately, and plenty of others beyond Diablo are happy to admit it - one developer, at GDC, described these kinds of games as playing the role of "cheeseburger-makers." There's nothing wrong with that! As he put it himself: "Not everything we want to consume needs to push or provoke us, that's fine… sometimes you just want a cheeseburger." It's a series tuned for morishness, addiction or compulsion, however you might prefer to phrase it - about playing the role of junk food and embracing that role openly. ![]() This is a series about - among other things - the barbed hooks of grinding loot. The compromise comes from the kind of tangle you get into with games like Diablo 4. And that what's good now comes with a lingering sense of compromise. Watch on YouTube Here's Digital Foundry's tech review of Diablo 4, to show it in action and up close.īut what to make of the Diablo 4 that's just Diablo 4? Play this game for dozens of hours and you'll be left with one overwhelming sensation: that soon, really soon, any minute now, it might get really good. Call this a campaign review if you like - the Diablo 4 that presents itself to you after however many dozens of hours is almost a game of its own, and so best we do that game justice on its own terms later on. For now, I'll focus on what I've seen already. We're aiming to follow up on Diablo 4's endgame in proper depth further down the line. ![]() To talk straight down the lens for a second then, here's the plan. ![]() The first of Diablo's seasons, and its first battle pass, remains over a month away though, and that's a little too long for us to get to. They are very expensive cosmetics - 10 quid horse armour feels like a twisted reference to where it all began - but they are just cosmetics. You can only buy cosmetics there, nothing that impacts gameplay. We know it's worked out surprisingly well in terms of stability - some way better than Diablo 3 infamously did, although you'd hope for that - and we know the shop has remained true to developer Blizzard's word. Availability: Out now on PC ( ), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.As you might've already seen, we delayed our review in part because we hadn't seen enough of Diablo 4 - but also because we hadn't seen the shop, or how its servers might fare when millions descend on it at once. My second, a wild sprint to still-not-quite-the-finish with a new Barbarian, remains ongoing. My first run through the main chunk of the game, with a doomed, soon to be self-detonated Necromancer, came to an end just as Diablo 4's story did, before I hit the enforced reset before launch. Try as I might, Diablo 4's endgame always remains just out of reach. A sense of fearful overcompensation holds it back. Like the Blizzard hits of old, Diablo 4 is a designer's game at heart, built on intricacy and depth. ![]()
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