List Item: Play 100 of the greatest computer games
Progress: 78/100
Title: Diablo II
Developer: Blizzard North
Original Platform: PC
Year: 2000
After a bit of a failed start to playing Baldur’s Gate (I pretty much fell asleep… which happens I guess) it took me a long time to think about what game to play next. Especially since I already spend a lot of time on Overwatch and have only just finished playing L.A. Noire. The deciding factor for Diablo II was that it would be a fun game to explore with the husband.
As I write this I am a long way from completely finishing Diablo II. It’s like Final Fantasy VI in that it’ll take me 30-50 hours to finish the game and, after a decent amount of playtime, you can just say that you’ve played it. I guess this is a long way of saying that Diablo II is a game where I am going to continue playing this for a while because, as expected, Blizzard know what they are doing.
Directly following the storyline of the first game, Diablo II starts as the evil being from the first game re-animates and continues his plan to enslave humanity. Your goal, therefore, is to defeat this evil as you kill monsters, complete quests and level up your character.
For my playthrough I went for the Amazon (who is a mix between a typical rogue and ranger character class) because of my love of playing characters with ranged attacks. The husband went for a paladin so that we had someone who could barrel in as I picked off enemies with my arrows (which are currently both poisonous and have the ability to give lightning damage).
Like in Overwatch everything in the game is balanced well and, at least so far, the difficultly curve is the right amount of shallow so that you aren’t overwhelmed too quickly (although that might be more the setting we picked). I’m also loving the variety in enemy types and level construction. Sure the quests are the typical kill this, rescue that, but the randomly generated item system helps to make each quest feel different enough to be engaging.
Usually an isometric point-and-click hack-and-slash game wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but there is something in Diablo II that helps to make it incredibly enjoyable and accessible. Once I finish this game properly, I think it’ll be time for me to have another go at Baldur’s Gate – maybe when I’m not exhausted after a long week at work.
As things currently stand I won’t have to play either Diablo or Diablo III unless I make the decision to expand my games list to a Top 250. Considering that I am only 22 games away from completing the Top 100… I guess I’ll need to think on that decision in a few years.
Before I Kick 