Diablo II Review

The genius is that loot never stops being a decision. Every drop is a small equation of affixes, resistances, and breakpoints, and the whole game is built to send you back through the same act because the next elite item might be the one that reshapes your build. Five classes with branching skill trees force real commitment, since points are permanent and a bad build stays bad, and Blizzard North tuned the campaign so the curve resets three times across Normal, Nightmare, and Hell.

Act II's desert and Act III's jungle sag badly, and the plot is little more than chasing Diablo's brothers between town hubs. What was engineered with unusual care is the texture of combat: the weight of the click, the readability of a screen full of skeletons, the ritual of a Baal run. Battle.net made all of it social, the expansion later added runewords that kept the economy alive for years, and the sprite art still reads cleanly at any resolution.