Diablo IV Review

The campaign is the surprise. Lilith is a villain with an actual argument, the cinematics are the best money Blizzard has spent on cutscenes in a decade, and the return to grime and candlelight answers the one aesthetic complaint that dogged the previous game for eleven years. The open world stitches together well, the necromancer and sorcerer builds have real identity, and world bosses arriving mid ride give the shared map a point.

Then the credits roll and the shape of the thing changes. Nightmare dungeons and helltides were not enough content to hold a hundred hours, the itemisation offered too many affixes that read as noise, and the first season answered a build diversity problem by nerfing what worked rather than lifting what did not, which is the response that tells you a live game does not trust its own numbers. Later expansions and season reworks improved it considerably. Judged on what shipped in June 2023, this is a superb twenty hours attached to a hollow hundred.