Thanks to preservation of the original game logic behind the scenes, Diablo 2: Resurrected retains every characteristic of the 2000 game, from your character's rapid, stiff-legged run to the whipcrack speed and binary flatness of the interactions.ĭiablo 2 is fast. The aesthetic achievement is one thing: it amazes me that the artists, working with clean modern rendering and lighting, have managed to summon the grimy, grittily textured, crepuscular atmosphere of the original pixel art, where grim details suggest themselves fleetingly amid the gloom. It's a fascinating approach that leads to a remarkably faithful recreation. Your detailed, 3D avatar reaches out to strike the monster next to her, but it's the chunky pixels underneath (or rather, the maths running underneath them) that determine whether or not the blow connects. This is the game you are actually playing. It does exist as the latter, but only as a dumb 3D audiovisual overlay that mimics the output of the original game 2D game logic running underneath. Nor is it exactly a remake: the content of the original game remade from scratch, to a greater or lesser degree of faithfulness, in a brand new engine. This isn't a remaster in the most widely understood current sense: the game's original assets, updated or redrawn to run in higher fidelity on modern hardware. Fortunately, Blizzard has allowed you to do this with one button press, instantly revealing the game as it looked in 2000 - pixelated, grainy, isometric, low-resolution and very much two-dimensional. To understand why, you need to look under the hood of this unique remake. Diablo 2's hero line-up is one for the ages - most of them memorable twists on well-worn archetypes. In fact, it would have required a fundamentally different approach. For example, local co-op play on consoles, such a delight in Diablo 3, has sadly not been implemented here, because it would have stretched the game too far out of shape. This purist attitude is certainly the right call, but it comes at a cost beyond the realm of difficulty and game balance. You're still restricted to a single respec per difficulty level - and if you end up with a character build you don't like after that, tough. You're still browsing a list of public games with garbled titles like ONLYDURIELPLS in the lobby if you want to play online. You're still running to your corpse, empty-handed and heart in mouth, to retrieve your armour, weapons and cash when you die. You're still playing item Tetris in a tiny inventory grid. But this is the limit of what the developers have permitted themselves for fear of altering its character too much.
You get a few minor but significant quality-of-life changes, including a shared stash for your characters to exchange loot in, automatic gold pick-up, and - since the game now has console versions - well-implemented gamepad support.
The important thing to know about Diablo 2: Resurrected is that it has done almost nothing to change this, for better or worse (spoilers: it's both). As influential as it has been, it's a singular, bloody-minded, almost awkward piece of work, and a defiantly unmodern one. Diablo 2 is a beast of a game that, 21 years on, still casts a long shadow - over the tortured development of its successor (a fate Diablo 4 doesn't seem to have escaped, either), and over the action-RPG genre it defined. That's not to say I don't have complicated feelings about Diablo 2: Resurrected for different reasons. But I've let it have no bearing on the rest of my review. Personally, as someone who loves the studio's games, I am conflicted and still undecided.
It feels important to lay all this out, but it's not my place as a critic to tell you how to feel about playing Blizzard games in 2021. But Diablo helped set the Blizzard tone, too, with its none-more-metal aesthetic, kitchen-sink lore, cutting-edge online multiplayer and endgame of abyssal depth and complication. Diablo 2 is an adopted child of the Blizzard culture at best. (Indeed, its former studio head Jen Oneal was recently named co-leader of Blizzard, a new broom presumably intended to lead reform there.) What's more, the original 2000 game was made by Blizzard North, an autonomous studio quite distinct from the SoCal mothership. Much of the work on it was done by Vicarious Visions, a blameless outfit only integrated with Blizzard earlier this year. In some respects, this beautifully produced remaster of Diablo 2 is unlucky to be Blizzard's first release since the state of California filed suit against the studio.
Platform: Played on PC and Xbox Series S.Developer & publisher: Blizzard Entertainment.