Diablo IV Review: A Worthy New Installment in the Acclaimed RPG Series

“Gosh, what a year huh? Captain, it’s only June.” If, like me, you sometimes think in terms of memes, you will undoubtedly see the picture of Tintin and Captain Haddock. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about this lovely image several times as I pounded through the dungeons of Sanctuary, enjoying all the best that Diablo IV has to offer. After all, when the review period started I had only just completed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and immediately before that was Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. A little longer ago I was playing around with the PSVR 2 and Horizon: Call of the Mountain and there was Hogwarts Legacy in front of it. There have been years with fewer top games than what 2023 has given us in the first six months and if you do pull in June, you can also include Street Fighter 6 and Final Fantasy XVI. Could be less.

Diablo IV is no longer unknown territory for many gamers. Blizzard hosted several beta tests and server stress tests to ensure that the game runs smoothly after its release on June 6. Whether that succeeds remains to be seen. For this review we were able to play the game for about ten days, on servers that were almost extinct. We’ve encountered another player maybe two or three times in the dozens of hours we’ve been in the game. When asked, Blizzard explained that that is not necessarily the intention either. “Diablo IV was not designed as an MMO,” associate game director Zaven Haroutunian explains to us. “Once the game is live you will of course see more players, but not that often; it is your own adventure.”

Benchmarks will follow later

Okay, that’s fine, but in the beta we certainly saw a lot of other players walking in the liquorice and that wasn’t now. Long story short: to judge whether Blizzard has succeeded in its goal of making the game reliable and stable, we have to wait a little longer for the release. After that time we will also publish an extra article in which we take a closer look at the performance, with a special focus on the PC version. During the review period, we only tested the PlayStation 5 version of the game. At the moment it technically holds its own: the game runs in 4k at 60 frames per second and that runs smoothly, but we will also review that version after the release to see whether the pressure on the servers still affects the performance. In any case, the first impression was good in this area, apart from a few bugs, such as that our controller seemed to stop working at a certain point, which required a restart. There is not much else to say about this at the moment.

So what can we talk about now? Well, everything else, starting with the setting and the story. If you’ve taken part in the tests, you’ve already played the intro to the story and you already know that Diablo IV revolves around the arrival of the evil Lilith to Sanctuary. The player may, on behalf of the Cathedral, find out what Lilith is planning and how to stop it. Sounds a bit simple this way, but the story has enough fun twists and colorful characters to keep you captivated from start to finish. We don’t really want to say more than that, because every little spoiler is one too many.

Beautiful cutscenes

It’s funny: when we spoke to some developers, they stated that people play Diablo for the story. I had no idea at all. For me, Diablo III was more of a game that I blasted through several times with friends, just because it was fun to do. I barely remember the story. It’s different for Diablo IV. This is primarily because the game has strong cut scenes, in which beautiful images are combined with excellent acting by the voice actors. The result is that the films grab you and provide audiovisual highlights. A nice detail is that your character also plays a role in the story. You are there, you participate in the conversation and are therefore not just an anonymous spectator who happens to be present. Yet you do not experience the story entirely from the first person. The various Acts are introduced and closed by the narrator, which works well.

The cutscenes are audiovisually of a higher level than the rest of the game, but that does not mean that the rest of the game is not also very well cared for. For starters, every conversation in the game is fully sounded and the voice acting performance is good there too. That makes quests, regardless of whether they belong to the main or not, all interesting: they are short stories in which you are sucked into and which are presented in an atmospheric way, partly thanks to the actors. In no time you will lose yourself in the overwhelming game world that is Sanctuary. And then the game actually has to start.