So a couple weeks ago I finally got around to playing Diablo 3. Personally, I would have passed on it, but my 11 year old son really wanted to play the game with me, so off we went and bought a couple of copies and started playing. About 18 hours later we’d finished the game and beaten Diablo. The surprising thing wasn’t that Diablo 3 was a particularly bad or good game but rather just how relentlessly boring it was.
I played about 75 hours of Torchlight 2 and other than the graphics and art design, Torchlight 2 was far and away the better game. There is no denying that Diablo 3 is a gorgeous game, but that’s about all there is to it.
The inventory system is dumbed down. The skill system is dumbed down and and annoying. The gameplay is repetitive to the point where I was ready to just stop by the time we’d finished Act III, and only finished Act IV so as not to disappoint my kid. Killing Diablo, which at least for me was the high point of the previous games, was almost an afterthought — a perfunctory, predictable boss fight to cap off a perfunctory, predictable game.
What a waste.