Diablo is a true guilty pleasure. I never thought I would like it, not being that much of an action person myself. Plus, third person games are rarely my favorite. But the racket over this game is hard to ignore. "It revived the entire RPG genre!" "It's habit-forming!" "It's the greatest PC game ever!" All right, all right already, I thought, let me give the game a try.

The day I was to install Diablo, I was perusing the manual while enjoying a quesadilla at Baja Fresh. Someone walked by my table and saw what I was reading. "Careful," he said. "That game is like crack." "That's what I've heard," I said.

Not taking his warning seriously, I innocently loaded Diablo onto my hard drive. Even from this point, the game is impressive, as it takes no time to load and takes up hardly any space on your hard drive. In this era of "go have a nice long dinner while waiting for installation to complete" games, this was a refreshing change indeed.

Developing a character is a snap as well. In fact, considering the game calls itself an RPG, this part is perhaps too simple. You only have three choices: a warrior, a mage, or a rogue. Each has his or her specialties. The warrior is the archetypal tough guy; the mage is handy with magic and the rogue is an expert with bows. Each character has stats in the following areas: strength, agility, vitality, and magic. Again, it's pretty stripped down as far as RPG gameplay goes.

Since I heard Diablo was all about kicking demonic butt, I decided to be a purist and play as a warrior.

Once this step was finished, I spent a few minutes wandering around the village and getting to know the inhabitants. It seems that recently a terrible evil has taken over the land, and it's up to me to boldly go into the bowels of the earth and straighten everything out. Pretty much your standard RPG premise.

The game is presented in third-person format very similar to Fallout, Baldur's Gate, or Planescape Torment. Not my favorite format, being a die-hard first-person person myself.

So I trotted over to the entrance to the underground cathedral levels and leapt into the game. Once underground, I spent a few minutes getting used to the interface. This took about fifteen seconds. Which brings me to Diablo's greatest strength: it's just so damn easy and intuitive to play. Click your mouse to make your character walk somewhere. When you see an enemy, click on the enemy to attack.

That's it. I've just described to you the entire game. Click on the bad guys and try to kill them. Why, then, is this game so bloody fun and addictive?

Tricky question. I shouldn't have liked this game. As I've said, third-person isn't my thing. Any my forays into the world of RPGs have been story-driven ones like Lands of Lore and Fallout. Diablo is a full-on, action/RPG dungeon crawl slaughter fest. And I enjoyed every minute of it. I suppose it's a tribute to the talented gamebuilders at Blizzard that they've created a game that truly reaches across genre lines and appeals to a very broad audience.

The game takes place on sixteen levels of descending depth and ascending difficulty. You meet many different kinds of monsters, from skeletons to undead nights to zombies and hottie girl flame-throwers. As in any RPG, as you move through the game you accumulate experience points and money, and you get to spend these on upgrading your abilities and weaponry. Playing a warrior? Beef up your strength so you can carry those really heavy, ultra-macho battle axes. Playing a mage? Max up your magic so you can throw those really scintillating spells.

Just as the character development is thin in Diablo, so are the quests. You'll run into a character or find a book that tells you a story about some specific subset of evil you need to go take care of. This quest gets added to your "Quest Log," which you can reference anytime you want. Basically this just provides a new area or a new nest of bad guys protecting a boss monster, and you have to go find the new bad guys and kill them. There's no real puzzle solving involved here. When you clear out the nest or kill the boss monster, the quest is removed from your log.

This is all well and good, but I wish the quests had been more complex, and I wish they had added more to the overall story. Plus, I found the game very stingy with experience points when it came to completing quests. I'd struggle for hours with a particularly tough boss monster, and then just get a run-of-the-mill amount of points for successfully dispatching him. This didn't seem an adequate reward for my efforts.

RPGs are known to be much longer games than adventures in general. However, Diablo is by far the shortest RPG I've ever played. Surprisingly, this may be one of its strengths. An RPG that only takes about thirty hours (or much less if you are experienced) to play is easy to play again. And Diablo has serious replayability virtues. Not only is there the opportunity to play through the game again as a new kind of character, but both the dungeons and the quests themselves are randomized each game. This really makes each game a new experience.

Graphically, the game is solid, and considering the grim nature of the story, the images are quite pleasing to the eye. The music is effective, particularly in town, when a melancholy acoustic guitar echoes the damaged atmosphere of the shattered village of Tristram.

Perhaps the biggest element of Diablo that may scare off adventure players is the odd save feature. You can create more than one hero, but each hero only has one saved game. In other words, within the game you can't branch off at all. You can't try something, and if it doesn't work, go back to an earlier saved game. There's only one game. This idea took some real getting used to.

My criticisms of the game pale, however, in the face of its almost scary playability. I'm now on my third time through the game. I have never played a game three times in my life.

For a long time I've been intimidated by this title, thinking that as an adventure wimp it wouldn't be accessible to me. I'm happy to report I was tremendously wrong. I can cheerfully recommend this dark game of demonic butt-kicking to gameplayers everywhere. Diablo is one of the ultimate crossover games that all players should try.

Final Grade: A+

If you liked Diablo:
See: How long you can play before your mouse hand goes into paralytic shock
Read: Why read a book when you could be playing Diablo?
Play: Diablo II, of course

System Requirements:

Pentium 60 or equivalent
8 MB RAM
2X CD-ROM
SVGA
1 MB VRAM
55 MB disk space
Mouse
Sound card

This review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link back to Just Adventure.