Grade: A-
I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo IV this week even though it came out last year. Why? Because along with simultaneously trying to save American democracy and make humanity an interplanetary species, Elon Musk’s third preoccupation is Diablo IV. When he’s not tweeting about the first two things, he’s tweeting clips of himself roaring through Diablo’s endgame content, slaying hordes of very high-level demons in timed dungeon runs.
He’s good at this, and since it takes getting on for a solid week without eating or sleeping even to reach the endgame, he’s sinking a lot of time into it. ‘Finished faster after masterworking my rod three times,’ he tweets, proudly. Lordy be, the nerds love him for it.
Diablo is a game of frantic combat, set in a moody fantasy realm that looks like an Iron Maiden album come to life: all horny demons, sinister sigils and blood-splattered peasants. It’s perpetually grey and raining, and it’s extremely good fun. It follows the time-honoured kill-monster-get-loot-equip-loot-kill-bigger-monster pattern, and follows it with some focus. All you do is kill stuff, nerd out over your character stats and skill trees, then kill more stuff.
You are showered with loot. In the early game you can upgrade your kit every other pack of monsters. You level up, ding, ding, ding. Click to move, click to kill, click to collect loot from floor, click to socket gems, click to temper loot… Click clickety-click. Your mouse is going to see more action than Richard Gere’s gerbil. At this rate it’s dollars to doughnuts that what finally does for Elon Musk won’t be the Deep State, or ketamine psychosis, or accidental contact with the Martian atmosphere.
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