PLATFORM: PC, PS4/5, XBOX ONE/SERIES (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW

With Diablo 3 still doing such a fine job of keeping players engaged more than ten years after its release, many might have been wondering what Diablo 4 could possibly have up its sleeve to tempt fans away from their old favourite and into an all-new adventure. There certainly wouldn’t be much point in just throwing in a new story and some updated graphics and hoping for the best, so instead developers Blizzard have given the Diablo formula a full-on makeover, turning it into an almost never-ending open world that could potentially keep players coming back for the next ten years.

Starting a new game, you’re asked to choose a character from five different classes. As always, each class comes with its own skills and attributes, and it’s well worth spending a few hours with each one to find your preferred class before fully committing to a single character. When you’ve settled on a favourite, the six-act campaign lies in wait, along with a host of side quests and other activities. As Diablo fans will be aware, everything you do in the game rewards you with either loot or some form of currency which will enable you to upgrade your skills and equipment – the whole idea is to just keep ploughing away to beef up your character before increasing the difficulty and tackling stronger enemies to gain better gear so that you can increase the difficulty again, get fancier loot, increase the difficulty again, and so on…

Beyond the main campaign, which will take around 10 hours if you rush through it, the post-game content is likely what most fans are looking forward to. Completing objectives for the Tree of Whispers rewards you with packs of loot (similar to Diablo 3‘s bounties), and Helltide events take place roughly every 90 minutes or so, casting a crimson shadow over part of the map and populating it with high-level enemies that can be slain to earn currency which in turn allows you to open unique chests containing (if you’re lucky) items that can’t be found anywhere else. The game’s regular dungeons – of which there are dozens – can also be turned into “nightmare” dungeons whenever you please. These dungeons tamper with the usual formula slightly by adding one positive modifier to the game along with two more that will test your skills – perhaps you’ll be given a boost to the damage you deal, but enemies might be granted additional health and higher elemental resistance, making them much more difficult to take down. With 100 tiers of difficulty and countless modifiers, each run through a dungeon is pretty much guaranteed to be different to the last, and these nightmare dungeons are a fairly reliable source of all-important high-level equipment that will give you a huge hand along your journey. There are also two PvP areas where players can either challenge each other or team up to take down enemies that would be nigh-on impossible to beat alone.

Diablo 4‘s endgame is entirely focused on levelling up your chosen character as much as possible, and there are certainly enough activities on offer to make this a very enticing (and addictive) prospect. Each class has access to around 25 skills that can be unlocked as you level up, and it’s easy enough to swap between them in the menu if you want to try out new combinations. After reaching level 50, you go beyond the regular skill tree and into the “paragon boards” which offer tons of different ways to enhance your attributes, unlocking minor boosts and major upgrades square by square as you pour your hard-earned paragon points into the board. Some of Diablo 3‘s upgrade mechanics have been streamlined to the point of almost not existing any more, which could be seen as a downside – you won’t be upgrading the jeweller or the blacksmith, for instance – and you now have to travel to your intended destination instead of just choosing an activity from the map and being transported there at the click of a button, but these are fairly small quibbles in an otherwise superbly-crafted action RPG. Whether Diablo 4 can reach the heights of its predecessor will only be answered as time goes by – D3 didn’t reach its full potential until a few years after release, so we’ll see how D4 fares in comparison. For now though, it’s off to a cracking start!