Diablo Immortal Review

I have recently played Diablo Immortal and overall, it's not too bad, it's not as good as say Diablo II Resurrected, but decent enough for a mobile game. (Not that I have that much experience with major mobile titles, including above mentioned Diablo Immortal, I played total one title)

To being with I would like to praise controls, one would thing controlling a character in a game as complex as Diablo, using only touchscreen will be cumbersome, but no, it works surprisingly smooth. Compare to Diablo II you can have much fewer spells at your fingertips, but they are designed well enough to get you through the game.

Most of the time game is relatively easy, which is good on mobile platform as you do not have too many way to deal with complex challenges. Most of the time the game is a smooth experience where you kill enemies with ease and just chill.

Unfortunately, those few times when game suddenly decides to get more challenging, you often have surprisingly little ways of actually dealing with it. Most bosses die within 10 seconds and drop plenty of health potions to heal you just in case, however close to facing Diablo himself they suddenly decided to go full Dark Souls and not only increased his health 10 times but hardly gave you nay potions or other ways to survive him. Unlike Diablo II you can't just fill inventory with potions and just chug on them near indefinitely.

Overall, its either you kill everything within a second or something just kills you in one shot. Since 97% of the time, it's the former, the game is playable and enjoyable, but the remaining 3% do annoy you from time to time, especially since you cannot pick up the fight where you left it with boss at half health, their health always restores to max and sometimes whole quests fail at one last boss. Hellquary bosses are particularly notorious for just killing you with one out of nowhere hit of some magic sphere, or beam, or similar.  

Story and plot leaves to be desired. I am no fan of Laconia (Sparta for those of you who do not know where it is), but sometimes it's better to be Laconic than verbose and this is one of these times. Sure, there are many more content, dialogue, cutscenes and such compared to Diablo II or I but overall, I found story and characters of Immortal much less likable compared to Diablo II. Alas woke and feminist trends managed to make their way into this game too. Too many women are too tough, and men are made fun of. I do not really share tastes with Immortal writers. Not all characters are bad but it's still but a 50/50 experience.

Game far too often overuses urgency. They tell you Diablo is out there terrorises certain locality, you rush there, beat everyone in a hurry only to find out that Diablo is in another castle have escaped you by a nick of time and now in some other locations. You rush there only to miss him over and over again. That may imitate Diablo II in theory where you too miss Diablo a few times, but there you did not really knew where Diablo really was and there was many other interesting and rewarding sub plots to keep you entertained and engaged.

Diablo himself and other evils are less likable too. In Diablo II, you can almost admire him for managing to mislead Marius so well, or how cleverly Mephisto managed to play Zakarumites against each other and take control. Here however big evils are more repulsive than clever and dealing with them often gives you sense of disgust and you wish it will be over sooner rather than later.

I wrote a separate article about overly exposed game mechanics like rewards for completing dungeons, full article here, but I will mention a few more things here. Not every part of the game is equally bad at this, for example Cyrangar exploration fits whole treasure search well into the lore about the place. The place has treasure chest already in place but uses special summoning mechanic to summon final boss. Generally, it is more interesting and better designed compared to hidden lairs, rifts and many other places, that alas went with kill guardian, get magic chest materialise from thing air approach instead.

Diablo Immortal has more different localities compare to Diablo II. Most of them are well designed, alas small smartphone screen prevents you from enjoying the views too much. This is one area where Diablo Immortal beats Diablo II, possibly even Diablo II Resurrected, with exception of Horazon's Arcane Sanctuary and Chaos Sanctuary of course. However, Library of Zoltan Kulle went close. There are few zones and subzones that I did not really like, but most of them are good.

Items again leave to be desired. Sure, Diablo II item system had its flaws, but it was an early attempt so not everything worked well in practice. Despite that Diablo II had cohesive progression from flimsier looking items to more formidable ones, repeated tree times in circles, due to three difficulty levels. Progression worked better on melee classes like Paladin or Barbarian, with magic users like Sorceress often had to adjust to system not designed with their class in mind.

In contrast Diablo Immortal system, despite having ample more experience to learn from and imitate the best, ended up with system where looks of item does not correspond to its power in any way. Items do not look better or more impressive, no matter how far you progress. Furthermore, they have system that tries to appraise the item to give you an idea if its better or not, but sometimes it makes glaring mistakes by marking clearly subpar items as superior. On top of that there are no real use for non-legendary items, other than to scrap them for mats, at least this is automated.

Few other complaints are tedious gem upgrading system where you have to switch to lower tier gem several tier gem to upgrade them and then finally upgrade your main one. Rather useless charm system that wastes time and money.

As for good things, then variety has to be it. There are plenty of different things to do in game to keep you entertained, if you do not like certain particular thing, often you can just ignore it and do something else. The game can keep you entertained even after main story have ended.

Finally, while they do offer you to buy various in game shit for real money, you can play without paying anything. A very important quality in times of ultra greedy money grabbing mobile game developers.

Overall, I can recommend it actually. It's not Better than Diablo II, but it's good enough to play something on a mobile platform.