Diablo IV Review: A Game that lost its Vision

I firmly believe that behind every good game there is at least one person with a clear vision. This vision can be an addictive gameplay loop, a new groundbreaking idea or an emotional story. But what happens when a game during development changes this vision or comprises it to appeal to a wider audience? Well you get a game like Diablo 4. A game that can be fun at times but lacks the soul of the greatest.

Great lore meets a bland story

Diablo IV starts out with a very strong cutscene, followed by a great prologue. Without trying to explain all the details we are on the hunt for Lilith, a demon who is the mother of humans in the Diablo lore. The intro promises an exciting plot and fight between demons, angels and humanity. With a lot of grey areas in between.

Before playing I took some time to listen to some videos about the lore of Diablo and it honestly made me excited to play the game. The core premise is great and that humanity is the result of an unholy child of an angel and a demon gives potential for great story telling. Because of that I was excited during the prologue and act 1 of Diablo 4. Following Lilith's first steps gave me hope for an epic adventure, sadly that hope didn't get fulfilled.

What follows after act 1 honestly can only be described as lazy and uninspired writing, meets a way too long game for its thin story. You will meet characters you will mostly not care about who send you from A to B to C and back to A and repeat. Sadly the game shows here clearly that the story is only there to serve as backdrop for its gameplay.

Only in the last act it gets somewhat exciting again with epic cutscenes and a decent twist. But it's simply not enough. The first expansion Vessel of Hatred only makes things worse. In some ways Diablo 4's story feels like someone asks Chatgpt for an exciting start and end for a story but then puts in no effort to fill the blanks in between.

Where the Vision got lost

Now let's talk about the most important part of Diablo 4, the gameplay. To get the basics out of the way. The core gameplay feel is great. The way your character moves, the animations of your skills, how much impact you have on your enemies. Diablo 4 feels good and smooth to play. But as soon as you start to look deeper the problems start to occur.

When Diablo 4 was in the beta the game felt very different. It was much slower and more tactical. You couldn't just make the whole screen explode but had to approach enemies with a bit of respect. To me it's clear that this was the basic vision of the devs.

In my eyes this approach would have worked great with many of the systems Diablo 4 included at launch. For example the game offers a huge open world, with many hidden dungeons. Those dungeons often reward you with new passive skills that can change the way you play the game. This could have felt amazing if those dungeons would be difficult and the skills would feel earned.

Sadly someone at Blizzard must have gotten cold feet before launch and already nerfed down the enemies to make the game a lot easier. Over the years this trend just continued. If you play the campaign in 2026 its balance is honestly not existing. No matter what spec you use, no matter if you take care of your items, no matter what skills you use, everything will die without any effort.

This lack of any sort of challenge makes the campaign often feel like simple busy work. You're discouraged from exploring the world, or from doing anything side quests because why would you? To become even more overpowered? Why care about item drops when you anyways kill everything just by looking at it?

To me the best games are those who follow a clear vision with only little or none compromise. One of the best examples of this was the fantastic Hollow Knight Silksong last year. No this doesn't mean that it's not ok to make an easy game. But if you do, you need to design the whole game around it.

If Diablo 4's campaign wants to be an easy breeze to play through they should have designed it that way. Make it shorter and include more memorable moments to the story. Maybe even add some little gameplay twists here and there to keep it fresh.

 Look at Nintendo games like Mario or Kirby. Most of those titles are easy but they keep on introducing new ideas to keep the gameplay fresh and exciting. Diablo 4 on the other hand plays the same after 2 hours as it does after 40 hours. The game does offer many systems for crafting and tweaking your characters but none of these are needed in any shape or form for the campaign.

Is Diablo IV fun?

At this point it should be clear the campaign of Diablo 4 is mid at best. It has a few exciting moments but overall it's just too bland. To many of the same environments, to little gameplay ideas and simply no guts to create a game with a vision.

All that said, yes Diablo IV is still fun. In the end the core of the game is its seasonal gameplay. Every few months releases a new season, with new features (more or less). The simple gameplay loop of creating a new character, leveling to max level and hunting for new loot is fun at its core. Compared to other games like Path of Exile, Diablo 4 does lack depth.

The game has less build choices and is in general easier to play. Still this is in general not a bad thing. To me Diablo 4 is like fast food for your mind. It gives you a fun time after a long day at work. It doesn't force you to make hard decisions and simply rewards you for being there and playing, while giving you new goals to strive for. But just like with fast food you won't be thinking about it afterwards and raving about how good this hamburger from mc donalds was.

Not every game has to be complex and overall I'm fine with Diablo wanting to be the casual ARPG. My main problem is that the game clearly was intended to be something else. This new Diablo 4 was built on the vision of the old one and its graveyards are still everywhere to see and remind you of what this game actually wanted to be.

Rating: Worth a Try