Diablo IV Lord of Hatred Review: Blizzard best Story since The Frozen Throne
Earlier this year I played Diablo 4 and its expansion Vessel of Hatred for the first time and it left me confused and conflicted. A setup with so much potential and yet it was so poorly executed. But I'm happy to report that Lord of Hatred learns from those mistakes and delivers the best Blizzard Product of the last twenty years.
A Campaign worth experiencing
Without spoiling too much the core setup of Diablo IV Lord of Hatred is really interesting. We are sent to the island of Skorvos, the place humanity was born. We are on the hunt for a weapon that could destroy Mephisto the Lord of Hatred who is currently disguised as Akarakt. Akarakt is pretty much a Jesus like figure who manipulates people into believing he is good.
This core setup is great but sadly our heroes as characters are not. Neyrell and Lorath, our 2 main companions during the base game and its first expansion, sadly stay quite flat and boring. This hurts the game as some emotional parts just don't hit as much.
What does work however are the demons. Mephisto and his amazing voice actor keep on being a highlight of Diablo 4 and in order to get to him we need to team up with Liltih. Her character finally becomes what it should have been in the base game.
What truly makes this campaign amazing though is its pacing. During the 10 hours of playtime we are constantly switching between interesting environments. Visually the game looks stunning and action packed. Another true highlight is the music. At one point you defend a town who gets stormed by demons during a heavy rainfall. Those visuals in combination with an epic soundtrack gave me true Lord of the Rings vibes.
What also helps with this is the difficulty curve is finally working. As a reminder one of my biggest complaints of the base game was that everything just dies in the later parts of the story no matter what difficulty setting you select.
In Lord of Hatred however the game stays somewhat challenging. Especially some of the bosses are true highlights in this regard. They have real mechanics that reminded me of MMORPGs and in some of them I died multiple times.
The two new classes, the warlock and paladin, are also greatly designed and fun to play. I honestly felt addicted during the story and always wanted to see what's next. The new talented tree also helped in this regard as you get to make many meaningful choices early on that can change your playstyle a lot. The end then was a true highlight and left me quite satisfied with what I experienced.
Diablo IV is finally out of the beta
My main take away from my Diablo IV Review: A Game that lost its Vision was that you could clearly see that the developers wanted to create a very different game but for whatever reason shifted it last minute and created a weird abomination of a game.
Now granted some of the skeletons of the original Diablo 4 are still there, however they are less noticeable now. Diablo 4 now finally feels like a game that makes sense. They added tons of crafting options with the horadric cube. Now a yellow item could become your best in slot. Playing around with all the craftings options is really fun and rewarding.
The War Plans as a new endgame activity also works great. Essentially you can select a few different activities you want to do in a row and at the end you get rewarded by great loot. Each of those activities also comes with their own talent tree now. It's a great system. Simple at its core but still with enough depth to be fun.
It's not all perfect though. The item system itself still feels a bit flat. It's enough to be fun for sometime but a bit more depth and more complex choices to make could really help here.
Diablo 4 is fun now
All in all I must say I had a great time with Diablo IV and I see myself checking it out again and again with the new season updates. Something that wasn't the case before Lord of Hatred.
I really hope Blizzard takes this great foundation now and keeps on building on it. There is a lot of potential here! However many big content creators already speculate that this might have been Diablo 4's last expansion. In my eyes that would be a big mistake, then if history teaches us one thing, it's that Blizzards always makes the base Diablo bad.
As it stands right now Diablo IV Lord of Hatred is fast paced fun, with snappy gameplay, enough depth in its systems and great class design. If your looking for a fun ARPG to play after a long day at work Diablo 4 is a great choice right now.
Rating: Recommended