I made the wise decision that buying a hyped game right after launch was a financial risk. Eventually I was bombarded with trial keys for Diablo III from anyone and everyone I've ever known. The results of this trial are mediocre at best.

I started with the game download. Not a painful wait just a throttled 2mbps download. After about 2 hours the download was completed and I was able to create a character. 10 choices 5 classes 2 genders to each. These classes were the Barbarian, the cliche hack and slash type. The Demon Hunter, a mix between Rogue/Ranger and Van Helsing. The Monk, the healer type with martial arts skills. The Wizard, your typical caster. Finally the Witch Doctor, a caster type that seems to be a Necromancer of sorts.

I settled upon being a Witch Doctor and fired up the campaign. The cinematics are nice, the feel of the story was more vague and tired than something that I could feel inspired by. Then after the videos I get immersed in the starting area. Combat is just a simple click and hold of the left or right mouse button as you search out each target. Risks are minimal for any experienced gamer. The scenery reminded me of a mix of Starcraft and WoW. The sounds were what they should be I assume for a zombie killing game and the background music was just that, in the background and barely noticeable. Even in the starting stages of the game it felt like a rehash of an old game rather than anything new. Sure they put some new paint up and cleaned the floors but all in all it's the same old house we grew up in.

I encounter the first mission, it's pretty much straight forward, talk to so and so then get the mission to find an item and kill enemies on the way. This was nothing new or challenging, that is until the lag. Did I forget to mention that you have to be online to play the game even in single player mode? Well you do. This has it's perks for Blizzard but downsides for anyone who has low bandwidth, needs to be offline, or my fav, when the servers lag in general due to player volumes on the server. I started getting all kinds of anomolies such as infinite shooting until the server synced up again, or mobs that wouldn't move/die until re-sync. The game even boots you off if you go AFK for too long just like a MMO. Given all of this I did eventually beat the first mission. Yay me, now I get to sort my loot.

Loot is everywhere, just like a MMO. The loot isn't the bad part, the bad part is the lack of artwork. I felt like I was looking at a Win98 era loot table with less effect than Baldur's Gate inventory imagery. Speaking of artwork the animations are standard at best. Even Soldiers Heros of World War II had better animations and hit location tracking and that game is over 7 years old. Any location is a hit as long as you clicked the enemy in D3. A zombie surviving the attack as half a zombie is based on luck rather than shot/hit placement.

After this point I started losing interest and just treat it as any other canned hack-n-slash dungeon crawler. I felt like I had been playing a mod to the old Diablo II game or a watered down mod of Titan Quest rather than playing a new game.

Final opinion on my end is, it's neat. Is the game $60 + tax neat? No. Is it bargain bin fun worthy? Yes. Save your money and wait until it's $15 or less. If you want colorful gaming and a wide variety of items I suggest Titan Quest. The imagery is very nice, and you don't have to be online to play it, or you could do the polar opposite and find any MMO to play.