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Diablo II Review
Sunday, August 20, 2000
Gameplay
The
shining star of Diablo II is its gameplay component, hands down.
It is
its sheer addictive style and hack-and-slash clickfest that draws
gamers
like a fat guy to a burger. The core of the game revolves around
this
simple principle: kill monster, get loot, get items to kill
tougher
monsters to level up and get more loot, and proceed to repeat. It
may not
seem like much, but it is _fun_. Gone are all the micro-management
tasks
and little quirks and complexities of other similar games; all
that is left
is pure action. For all of you role-players out there, fear not.
Blizzard
has included a very robust character skill advancement tree. What
this
means is that if you had, say, two Barbarians, each of the same
level, but
played by different people, then you would most likely have two
totally
different characters. The skills are divided into tabs, with
different
skills for each character, with some skills being available only
at a
certain levels, and some skills requiring that you have already
trained a
requisite skill.
For instance, if the Barbarian trains the skill "Find
Potion" at level 1,
he'll be able to get the "Find Item" skill at a later
level, since Find
Potion is the requisite for Find Item.
Each level you gain awards you with 5 stat points and 1 skill
points. Your
stats are your standard Strength, Dexterity, Energy, Vitality, and
the
such. Each of those affects a different thing, such as Energy
determines
the amount of Mana you have, while Vitality judges your amount of
hit
points. Some items and weapons require that you have a minimum of,
say, 25 Strength and/or 20 Dexterity to use.
Continue
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