The new lighting complements these crisp visuals, with torches and spells casting shifting shadows across the scenery, adding no end of atmosphere to the game world.
The widescreen presentation and newly minted 3D visuals look great, especially in 4K (although there’s sadly no support for HDR) and the Series X and PS5 versions come complete with the option to shun resolution in favour of a crispy smooth 60FPS performance mode. Vicarious Visions, fresh off their success with Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1+2 last year, have done a fantastic job in semi-modernising this PC classic. With your newly minted character you spawn into an encampment near the recently destroyed village of Tristram (see the first game in the series) where you’ll chat to some NPCs, grab a quest and set off into the wide world to slay monsters and restore peace to the land across a 5 Act story. The original PC release’s expansion pack, Lord of Destruction also added the Assassin and Druid classes – as this is spun into the game here, those classes are all present and correct. You choose your character from a selection of archetypes in Diablo II this ranges from the tanky Barbarian and Paladin, to the all rounder Amazon and weirdo magic users the Necromancer and Sorceress. For those not in the know, Blizzard’s Diablo games are arguably the granddaddy of the modern ARPG, all isometric viewpoints, grim dark dungeons and tons of loot.
The thing is, I thought I had – I thought I’d picked up the game on its initial PC release, something that I even mentioned in my Switch review of Diablo III back in 2018, but very quickly into my XBox play through of Vicarious Visions snazzy new remake I truly had one of those Gandalf “I have no memory of this place…” moments, something that very quickly scuppered me – but we’ll come to that later. I’m going to start this review with a confession – until this Resurrected edition I had never played Diablo II.
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