There are two types of review perspectives for long-running series like Diablo. The first, and probably most common, is having someone who has been with the series from the beginning talk about all the changes made to the latest entry, figuring out if this is the best the series has been or if it’s repeating mistakes of its past. The other is having someone who has never played the series at all try it out and see if it’s a good entry point for the series, figuring out if a new player could jump in, or if there’s too much required knowledge of the mechanics or lore to catch up.
This review of the latest Diablo IV DLC, Lord of Hatred, is going to be the latter kind.
Anytime I saw a rad-looking cinematic trailer that ended up being for Diablo, I would always ask my friends if I should finally try to jump into the series. As someone who grew up mostly playing console games, this series and games like it were something that I completely missed. I love hunting down demons and slaying horrific monsters, so thematically it seemed like something that would be up my alley, but even friends who had hundreds of hours cautioned me that it might not be for me, especially given the sheer amount of systems in place for gear and build crafting.
Even with all the warnings, it continued to call to me. Lord of Hatred finally seemed like a good place to jump in and check out what the series had to offer, and it’s been an interesting journey.
Jumping Into Diablo as a Newcomer and What to Expect
While I really wanted to see what was new in the game, I decided to get my feet wet with the series by starting out with the base Diablo IV experience first. I created a Necromancer character, watched the gorgeous opening cinematic, and ran through the tutorial area. Once I was in that starter town, my first impressions were a mix of overwhelmed and underwhelmed. Given that this series has been around for decades, and that this game in particular has also been around for almost three years itself, there are a lot of systems that you need to get acclimated to quickly.
Building your character is a combination of assigning points on a big skill tree and equipping gear that has many, many different stats. In the beginning, it’s hard to figure out if I should be prioritizing a helmet that has higher armor or one that has higher max life. Each piece has so many different numbers attached to it, and it’s not easy to actually see how that is playing out in practice.
There’s also a ton going on in the map. It’s riddled with markers for side quests and dungeons, never really giving you an indication of their overall importance, at least for a new player like me. I could tell where the next main quest objective was, which was what I was mostly focusing on, but I didn’t really know which side content was worth doing. I remember early on stopping in a big orange circle and being told this was an “event” with a small objective. I survived waves of enemies for about a minute and a half, and a big treasure chest spawned with loot for me, and that was kind of it.
There wasn’t a little story with it, or any sort of unique mechanic; it was just fight guys, get loot. I’ll get to my issues with loot later, but it wasn’t the type of content that compelled me. Going into a dungeon was a similar experience, albeit one with a bit more meat on its bones as far as time spent, but even then, I wasn’t really finding much outside of new gear of questionable usefulness and some XP grinding.
Even with all this going on, I was also a bit underwhelmed by how it felt to actually play. As you build out your skill tree, you’ll add various abilities to your arsenal. Aside from your basic attacks, these generally have a cooldown or resource cost for you to be able to use them, which can give a good rhythm to combat, but the complexity of the encounters rarely feels unique. Most of the time, it boils down to a large group of enemies rushing at you, and fighting them off by spamming attacks over and over again until everything is dead. There are a lot of different enemy types, but it’s rare that they are unique in a way that makes you change up your strategy, leading to encounters often feeling lackluster and repetitive.
Build Crafting vs Skill Execution: What Really Matters
One of my buddies saw me playing on Steam and asked if I wanted to join him, and playing with him helped me get a bit more of a handle on what exactly was going on in the game. What I learned is that this game is largely a game of build crafting rather than combat execution. Obviously, you do have to be able to manage your health potions and cooldowns during a fight, but the majority of your success is going to come from how you’ve set up your character prior to the fight even starting.
I also learned that the grind is the game for most players. The appeal of the side quests or events is not that they contain a compelling little short story or a clever encounter, but because it’s another opportunity to see the numbers go up for your character. In addition, he explained several ways I could augment my gear, making way for stronger builds and more options.
After getting about half a dozen hours into the base game, I decided to move on to the Lord of Hatred DLC that I was going to be looking at for this review. It started with a great cinematic that recapped the base game and previous DLC, Vessel of Hatred, catching me up to speed on everything I needed to know. As much as I liked the base game’s narrative hook, this one was even better, drawing me in immediately. Without getting into spoilers, the tale that unfolded over the next 12 hours was one of false prophets, ancient evils, and dramatic sacrifices. It wasn’t the most unique or sharply-written game story, but it nailed the feeling of a hellish summer blockbuster, presenting an epic fantasy quest about the final stand against Mephisto and his demonic forces.
Blizzard clearly puts money into the narrative content of this game, and it pays off in spades. The cutscenes in the game are incredibly detailed and cinematic, creating arresting imagery to emphasize its most impactful moments. The voice acting is also top notch, bringing life to the scenes that are presented in-engine from the game’s basic isometric perspective. You’d think seeing these characters standing motionless from a bird’s eye view would hamper the impact, but when the voice cast features someone as iconic as Ralph Ineson, you’ll be hanging on to every word. On top of that, the beautiful music brings scenes to life, adding an urgency with its sweeping orchestral score.
It was during my time with Lord of Hatred that I began to click more with the combat. I started with a fresh character, switching to Paladin, one of the new classes introduced in the DLC. Being able to spend more time with the character allowed me to figure out how to build my character in a way that worked for my playstyle. Each skill not only can be upgraded to different levels but can also have a variety of modifiers applied to it, making them function in fundamentally different ways. Diablo IV is very generous with respecing, allowing you to refund ability points and move them around without any penalty. It’s commendable how much this game encourages experimentation, especially with the rate at which you get new gear, allowing you to evolve as you go and try new things when you hit a wall.
My Paladin had two basic attacks, a melee strike that zoomed me towards enemies and a projectile hammer throw that bounced from target to target, along with a suite of attacks that did area of effect damage. Generally, my strategy involved dashing into the fray, laying down a circle that did damage over time to anyone standing in it, then raining down spears from the sky that would hit in a smaller section.
When it was ready, my ultimate attack would create giant beams of light that chased down enemies and laid waste to them. It’s an amazing amount of particle effects on the screen at once, and the visual splendor of it is hard to deny. Even when the encounters weren’t that tough and or unique, there was something about watching it tear through dozens of enemies that was viscerally pleasing on a base level.
Dungeon Crawling and Setpieces Soar While Boss Fights Feel Punishing
Not all the encounters are compelling; sometimes, you’ll just run into a very random mob of enemies while traversing the world map that’s barely worth stopping to kill, but Lord of Hatred does a decent job of creating big action setpieces in the game’s dungeons or during big story beats. The moment-to-moment execution of it never gets too complex, but seeing waves of dozens of enemies descending upon you is a sight to behold. Dungeon crawling is made to feel more exciting through setpieces, but the best use of it is in big city sieges that play out at key moments.
It might just be the perspective, but it makes you feel like you’re in a massive real-time strategy game, using your single character to do the work of massive armies. Getting on your horse and riding through a battlefield to look for elites you’ve been tasked with killing makes you feel like the hero in a conflict that’s much larger than you, an illusion often hard to pull off in games.
There’s not much variety tactically for standard enemies, but there is a wide range of creatures for you to run into throughout the many different regions you’ll explore. They’re all beautifully rendered, even though their details are harder to see given your isometric perspective. While I’m mostly just clicking on them until they die, there’s still a thrill to see some horrible scorpion rider pop up with a name like “Infernal Corpse Tamer” that adds a little pizazz to a simple fight.
Boss fights add the most variety to combat, but they also find ways to highlight the most frustrating aspects of the game for me. Since I was a beginner, I alternated between playing on normal and hard, and boss fights were really the only places where I would die. Health potions both recharge and are dropped by enemies, so managing my health was part of the battle, and one that only got challenging during boss fights. Too many times during these encounters, I would get caught in a big attack that would either do more damage than I realized or just completely one-shot me, leading to extreme frustration.
This frustration is made even worse by the game’s dodge, which feels inadequate. Bosses will often place targets on the ground signaling an attack or make certain areas dangerous terrain, and the mobility in this game simply doesn’t give you the tools you need to deal with it. By default, the cooldown on the dodge was five seconds, which feels like so much time when you’re trying to keep out of the way of projectiles. There were so many times when I could dodge an attack, only to see the boss start the windup for an upcoming one-hit kill move, but I was unable to avoid it because my dodge was still on cooldown. Boss fights can last upwards of ten minutes, so when this would happen near the end of an encounter, it felt incredibly bad, leading me to quit and walk away for a bit.
This comes down to personal taste, but I wish there were more precision in the combat. As I mentioned, so much of the encounter is determined by your build going into it, but it seems like the bosses ask for a level of precision that isn’t asked of you in the rest of the game. For me, the game would be better if it asked this of you the whole time and gave you the tools to execute on it. Whenever I see an isometric game, I always jokingly ask my friends, “Is this a Hades or a Diablo?” and, after giving Diablo a fair shake, I think I can say the execution focus of Hades is more appealing to me than the focus on pre-battle build crafting.
After you beat a boss, you generally have to do my least favorite part of the game, gear management. It’s really cool to see a bunch of items pop out of the boss for you to pick up, but going through those items one by one, comparing the overwhelming number of stats on each to what you already have, is just not fun to me. My design preferences lean towards less gear that’s more impactful, and Diablo’s design is the complete opposite of that.
The amount of gear it throws at you makes me actually less invested in the gear I have. There are ways to improve your gear to make your build stronger, but oftentimes it feels foolish to waste your time with it, because you’ll come across something that’s just a little bit stronger than the improvements you made within the next twenty minutes, so why bother? I know rarity and loot drops are a big part of the endgame of Diablo IV, which I did not really engage with, so this treadmill obviously works for many players, but it simply does not resonate with me.
Is Lord of Hatred Worth It for New Players?
Despite the complexity of a lot of its systems, after my time with Diablo IV, I found it to be much more of a casual experience in execution, and I don’t mean this in a negative way. The best time I had with the game was when I was just kinda zoning out and spamming my attacks at hordes of enemies. Much like playing a tabletop campaign of Dungeons and Dragons, there is a very basic pleasure that comes from your character’s stats increasing as you level up and get new equipment, even if I rarely wanted to do the fiddly part of equipping it all. I promise this isn’t an insult, but it feels like a great game to play on your Steam Deck while casually watching TV, turning off your brain, and experiencing your character get incrementally more powerful as you grind through quest after quest.
Even though Diablo IV isn’t exactly my type of game, I definitely had a good time with Lord of Hatred, despite many points of friction. While the combat wasn’t quite as reflex-based as I usually enjoy, the presentation and escalation provide a great power fantasy throughout its epic quest of a campaign. If you’re looking for a tour of beautiful locations where you fight appropriately gnarly-looking monsters, Lord of Hatred will do it for you.
It’s entirely possible that when the game fully drops, I’ll sync up with my buddy again, pick a new character class, and play through again while hanging out with him. There’s clearly a wealth of options for very distinct characters, and from the looks of it, the post-game content is robust enough to keep you playing for as many hours as you want.
It might feel like a lot for new players, but a little time with it, and maybe some research online, and you’ll quickly find out what is worth engaging with for the experience you want to get out of it. I found it pretty easy to ignore a lot of the stuff that was uninteresting to me to keep me focused on the good stuff.
Review code provided by publisher. Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred will launch April 28 for PC via Steam and Battle.net, Xbox Series, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4.