Half a dozen non-player characters mooch about towns offering services on request, but none have any real personality-they're just vending machines on legs. There's no party to manage, no lengthy conversations to navigate, just your single all-conquering hero. Stripped down to the bare essentials, Diablo II is a real-time all-action slaughter-fest with simple point-and-click controls, lots of monsters to kill, and thousands of subtly differentiated items for the player to accumulate and toy with. As the game progresses, then, you get to tackle more powerful monsters… and are rewarded with even heftier power-ups… which enables you to defeat even more powerful monsters… which results in a still further enhanced player-character… and so on.įirstly, it embraces the stereotype, and offers the purest possible implementation of the primal dungeon-crawl experience. Your efforts are rewarded with increasingly powerful weapons, armour and magical items, and an alter-ego which grows in ability as he or she gains experience. You create a puny and impoverished character, then run around a fantasy world fighting monsters. The game's fundamental hypnotic appeal is obvious a tried-and-tested formula. You sit down for a quick play-just to find the next dungeon, you tell yourself just to get your bearings in the next section-then you regain consciousness with the alarm clock ringing from the bedroom and an arm so tensed from all-night mouse-clicking that it barely feels part of you any more. Although I will call it repetitive and unoriginal, claim that it encourages inelegant play, and curse its fetishistic immaturity, the plain, painful fact is that Diablo II is the most brutally addictive game I've played since Half-Life. And while there are some things I want to say about Diablo II which are by no means in its favour, my criticisms ultimately count for nothing when set against that pervasive muscular ache.
0 kommentar(er)
