As for the playability of the beta itself we actually left more impressed than we thought we might be. Truth be told, Diablo was great fun but after a while (admittedly quite a long while) the hack and slash got boring. Somehow this mere beta managed to rekindle that feeling that the original Diablo sparked in us. We felt a desire to constantly gain yet another level by wreaking vengeance on the enemy hordes regardless of their numbers, just as we did with the original. We suspect much of this is due to the greater variety Blizzard North have injected into the gameplay. You can wander outside on the Blood Moors killing zombies and the like before descending into various dungeons to make your way through a given task. Mana is also now used by the Barbarian to execute a powerful Bash attack, which you can bind to the right mouse button. Other skills include various war cries that do things like frighten monsters away and a particularly useful ability that allows the Barbarian to try and get a health potion from monster corpses. And then there is of course his well-known ability to use two weapons at once which is a load of fun to try.
The one possible sore point we noticed was the graphics. They run at 640x480 with what seems to be less than 32 bit color. However as the saying goes, it's not what you've got it's what you do with it (get your mind out of the gutter) and from what we could see, Blizzard North are doing a great job with it. The water in the river looks great with little spatters on the surface if it's raining. The tile sets are gorgeous and varied and the character animations are well done. They'd look even better at higher resolutions though. We can only hope that it'll be possible to up the resolution with a quick .ini file modification as it was with Tiberian Sun, or indeed through the in-game options.
For those of you who missed getting on the beta, worry not. As you probably know Diablo II recently went gold and will be in stores around the globe towards the end of the month to ruin a few more careers once more. And for those people who aren't going to immediately going to buy it on release (we're sure they exist somewhere) we'll have a full review for you as soon as we've played the game through and probably gone to hell and back a few times in the process. For now, we're going to play more of the stress test...
Pete Closs
Editor