Diablo III Review

Strip away everything around it and Diablo III has the finest combat feel in the franchise. Weapons connect with real weight, the class fantasies are distinct rather than reskinned, and a Monk chaining spirit generators into a Seven Sided Strike is one of the great tactile pleasures in action games. What surrounded it at launch was indefensible. A single player campaign locked behind a login server produced Error 37 and days of downtime, and the real money auction house did something worse than annoy people: it forced the loot tables to be tuned so that finding a good item yourself was statistically hopeless, because the economy depended on you buying one.

A game about the thrill of drops had the drops designed out of it. The story is melodrama with a villain reveal telegraphed from the first act, and the art moved toward a brightness the series faithful never accepted. Reaper of Souls and Loot 2.0 fixed almost all of it two years later, which is praise for the repair job, not the ship.