I played the original Diablo and Hellfire expansion. I played it through the DevilutionX engine, which I think adds a few quality of life features.
On one hand, the game still kind of holds up. The click on hordes of enemies and collect loot that falls from the sky is a pretty solid gameplay loop, even as basic as this game was. The big issue with this is that there really isn’t a whole lot of reason to revisit this game since Diablo 2 just did everything bigger and better.
There were a number of annoyances with this one. Not a whole lot of customization for characters. The movement speed is incredibly slow (Hellfire added running in town, but even that was slow). DevilutionX adds a speed setting, which made moving in town at least a little better.
To play on the harder difficulties, the most important stat is your to hit. But the game shows you have over 100%, which is kind of misleading. I was getting my ass kicked, and had to look up strategies to find out how important it was to get even higher.
It’s also annoying how you get stun-locked by blocking enemies in a crowd. And the ranged enemies keep running away from you, sending you on a chase, and the pathfinding algorithm was a bit janky, making it worse.
The loot in the game isn’t the greatest either. Unique item drops feel like the big prize, but they decided to make most of them not that great and include a drawback. The best items you end up buying, and that is a bit of a lottery.
I had fun with it, but it’s hard to recommend to anyone to revisit the game. Just get at least Diablo 2 instead.
