Diablo II

January 14, 2026

I'll be blunt: I do not like Diablo II . It is a game that I have known about for decades and never really felt the need to seek it out. It's something I have only enjoyed from a distance, hearing others talking about it, seeing trailers, and watching clips. I should have kept that distance. Not too far into my first session with the game, I was already looking for ways out. I told myself that I would see it through it's first act out of respect for the legacy. Afterall, this is a critically acllaimed game. Not only does it have a dedicated fanbase eons after release, but it is regularly recognized for the impact it had on 'games' at large. So, now at the end of Act I am I pressing on? Absolutely not.

Every time I have jumped into the game it constantly reminds me that it is a thing to do rather than a fun game. I really don't want to be a downer from the jump, so lets start with what I did enjoy about my time with the game. The vibes are solid. This is less-so driven by the music (which is good), but is actually due to the graphical antiquities that I don't see very often nowadays. These hit a nostalgia trigger that reminds me of going to the computer fair in the 90s with my father, digging through discs of screensaver software, in a headspace where I was impressed by images moving on the screen syncronized with the musical movements of Swan Lake. The UI triggers this, specifically health and spell spheres presented as big red and blue orbs that are very shiny to show off their orbital roundness. Dazzle inducing moments also come from areas where shadow and light dance with one another, I'm talking about your caves, jails, and tombs. The quiet moments here are the pieces that made me think wait, actually maybe there is something here for me?

Midway through Act I, there is a mission that sends you to the village of Tristram. This was my favorite part of my playthrough. You are sent out to free someone from capture, you then get to hang out with that dude in your hometown as a little reward. This felt like a neatly designed little mission where the rest of the game felt like a updated take on the game Gauntlet. I'm not sure if this section stuck with me because it was a much needed repreive from digging for the sake of digging, or if more of those missions would have made the game a little more enjoyable for me.

That digging though? A total slog. The main loop of the game as far as I can tell is to get out there and vaccum up as much stuff as you can. This isn't a compelling proposal to me generally. To make matters worse, that vaccum is more like a Handi-Vac. I became overburdened within eight minutes of starting my expedition. Eight minutes of freedom before the rest of the game became an exercise in inventory management. I had to compare and contrast loot I didn't care about to eek out incremental improvements. In a dark cave with sick lighting effects, I'm instead stressed about my small rucksack, stuck in menus comparing and contrasting two pairs of boots for a small boost in stats. Who cares? I certainly don't.

At least through Act I, this problem is never addressed. If anything, the game expects you to really care about these small differences. It wants you to dig into the stats and be excited about the opportunity to dive back into the menu for a chance to make your small clicks on enemies mean just a little bit more. I had enough of that pretty quickly. I don't want to constantly worry about what to sell, what to keep, what to store, what to use. If I really wanted to get that experience, I'd just organize my closet--it could use the attention.

After a while, I came to the realization that I should just ignore this aspect of the game. For my own enjoyment, but also for the sake of giving the game an honest shot. Only swap out items when it is a clear improvement, only engage in those menus when an item seems worth the annoyance. Once I did that, I was able to enjoy my time just a little bit more, but the game also started to feel a lot more passive. I was just sort of roaming around for the sake of it, the game had lost its thrust. I was disengaged from the core mechanic.

This gets me back to where I started, Diablo II is just a thing to do. People call these things 'podcast games' nowadays. I can see the appeal here. Maybe I could have gathered some friends to squeeze some more fun out of it, but I wasn't enjoying it on my own, why would I push someone else to toil with me? So, I pressed on as a single player, grasping at straws for what was fun, and only finding tedium. The fighting wasn't dynamic, the item management was brutal, and the exploration was lacking as well. Exploring jails and caves are interesting on paper, but largely had me role-playing as a janitor--hitting floor after floor, sweeping around for the sake of it. The reward for each cleared floor was more of the same. I had always appreciated Diablo II from a distance, but suspected it would not be my jam. Now I know.