I first exprienced the greatness of diablo 2 in 2005 when a schoolmate introduced it to me. We played it together for a few years, with maybe hundreds of different characters which neither ever made it past normal act 1. Thinking back, im surprised how long we could spend running around dark woods just having fun without ever progressing much.

It was first in like 2009 when i got my own PC copy, that i picked it up and decided to learn how to play for real. Fast forward 16+ years and multiple dead lvl90+ hardcore characters later and i first now feel like I got a good grasp on how this game plays.

Diablo 2 is one of the super rare games that truly stood the test of time and that cant just be imitated. There are only a few games like this, the biggest probably being WoW.

One of the big things making D2 survive for this long in my opinion, is all the different items variations and the crazy min-maxing involved with them. Whether it being all the random insane rolls you can get on exceptional and rare items or perfect rolls on unqiues and runewords and if the item should or shouldnt be etherial. It creates near endless ways to make unqiue and insane characters and where even if you go for one of the more standard “classic” builds like e.g. a hammerdin, smiter, frozen orb sorc, javazon, bowazon, trapsin or even mosaic or whatever build you go for, even though the setups are all kinda similar, your build will typically always have its own uniqueness with the rolls on your gear and the typical choices with rings, amulets, boots and gloves often leaving more space for you to be creative and choose whatever pieces you like the best. all depending on your playstyle of course and if it is softcore or hardcore.

Mentioning hardcore, this is a gamemode offered in many games and not something really unique to diablo, but i think that with the difficulity of d2 and the thousands of different combinations in gear the game offer, hardcore does have a whole dofferent feel to playing softcore, more so than in other games. When i switched to hc, i was very afraid of losing my characters, like most people, but that fear totally left me after my first loss of a semi expensive lvl 91 fire sorc, it just made me more hooked on hc. The second time around i decided to experiment with build differences between sc and hc and slowly realised that i prioritise a lot differently now. I guess im just try to say that i really recommend hardcore mode for d2, as i think it fits this game so well and you really get to know the game better. Im getting side tracked a bit here.

Beside this game offering you a lot of choices and creativity gameplay wise, the story and game design is also phenominal, I really really like the grim dark story, something that unfortunately ended with d2 and never seemed to properly return, atleast not in the same way. Following in the steps of Marius and the dark wanderer through the different acts while being told the story through Marius own narration in the cutsecenes, served as a really good way to learn about this universe and the horrors within it. I remember being actually excited for the cutscene whenever i finished an act.

A game like this, of course also has phenorminal soundtracks, i mean, people who never played this game knows what the tristram theme sounds like. but there are equally good tracks throughout the entire game, my favorites being the act 1 camp track and maybe the lut gholein one. But they are all ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ good.

Another aspect of this game i really like and wanted to quickly mention is the use of Marcenaries. This is one for the things i found myself missing a lot when playing through diablo 4. That you can hire and gear up your own mercenary who also have their own level and abilities adds yet another way for you to max out your clearing speed potential.

So is this remaster better than the original?. To me it is nothing but a huge upgrade. This remaster took late 90s graphics and made them modern while still sticking to the original games very unique grim dark feel. The fact that they pulled it of this well, still surprise me now whenever i launch the game and it restored some of my faith in Blizzard. But beside it just living up to the original visually, it also just plays well and with all the QoL improvements this remaster has, i personally think it plays better than the original. But it might be hard to convince diehard fans of the original that this remaster is an upgrade, idk. This master still gets updated though, the devs are still introducing new runewords and with that new builds are made possible, some very game breaking. But it is kinda wild to see that 26 years after the original released.

This is the best remaster of any classic game that I have ever seen and played, no doubt about it and Im glad this game is finally on Steam. Time to level up another character.
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Help me out by following my Curator, I’d really appreciate it!!

So, it took me a bit to finally play this adult sci-fi adventure game. I must have had it on my wishlist for a few years by now, but decided to get it during autumn sale since the price didn’t seem to come any lower than the 15 bucks I paid. At first, I thought about comparing this game to the likes of Huniepop, but after playing through this, I realized that this game is in its entirely own league!

I haven’t had this much fun in a game like this in a while and I initially set out to 100% this game and I almost did, if it wasn’t because my backlog of games is growing faster than I can keep up with. I did clear half of the entire galaxy though, leveled every single crew member to level 40, did every devotion quest, unlocked every Pandora scene and spent a decent amount of time in the Eldritch Trials, at least enough to form an opinion on them. So, let’s get to it.

I liked the overall story they wrote for this game. It fits really well with the structure and theme of the universe they created. You play as this criminal, sarcastic and very confident anti-hero, a bit like a Deadpool kind of character. He is the main protagonist and is the captain of a stolen ship called the Mary Celeste. The overall plot of the story is that he forms a crew of rebels to take on the Imperium and restore personal will and freedom in the universe. Saying more will end up spoiling things, so I’ll leave it at that.

The gameplay is where this game is having some issues. I have seen a lot of people talk about this as the reason they didn’t like the game, and while I agree with some of it, I also don’t think it is that bad and I enjoyed it for the most part.

There are two types of combat in this game. A top down shoot em up space combat mode, where you fly around shooting waves of enemies and choose a crewmate as a co-pilot for her special ability. And then a turn based ground combat mode where you choose a crewmate and three alien beasts from a given selection to fight on foot. The ones of you who read my other reviews know that I’m not normally a big fan of turn based combat, but this is one of the exceptions where turn based combat definitely was the best choice.

Enemies come in all varieties, there are 4 or 5 different enemy factions I think, all playing really differently, some way harder than others. There are also a decent number of boss fights, which by far are the hardest fights in the game.

Not much strategy is really needed at any time, I don’t know if that is a bad thing though. There are maybe a few challenging missions, but they are very doable after a few restarts, and even if they aren’t, you can just activate victory protocol after three deaths and cheat win the missions.

There are multiple types of quests and objectives in this game. The first are obviously the main quests, which hold the main campaign and story mode within them. There are a handful of main quests which are each around 40 minutes, assuming you don’t just skip everything.

Side quests in this game are kind of useless. Most of them include a very short attached story that just consists of a short dialogue and some mission briefing text and there are no scenes in the side quests, which makes the really boring. There are also what I call miscellaneous quests, they are just all the leftover planets in the galaxies once you did everything else.

We also have two other types of quests. The first is devotion quests, which are personalized quests for each crew member, excluding Fow-Chan. They are shorter but essentially much higher quality quests than the main quests and each one includes a long spicy scene that is like a full blown movie. The devotion quest scenes serves as like the grand finale to the game.

The last is the Eldritch Trials, which become available in engineering once Fow-Chan has been unlocked at the very end of the main campaign. They are endless waves of either ground or space combat scenarios. They don’t seem to scale in difficulty the further you get up, so it is more like an endurance test than a skill thing. These trials are however a really fast way to level up your crewmates.

I do have two complaints when it comes to mission design. The first is that side missions would have benefitted a lot from including special scenes, at least if just some of them had had hidden scenes or something like that. At least there would have been more of an incentive to go do them all. I think it would have been better to take all those Pandora scenes and scatter them across all the side missions instead of just making them unlockable with points. Having them assigned to missions would also help add a story to them.

The other thing is that when it comes to the missions where I can select a character to do the job for me, like the Demi part upgrade missions, why am I given the option to pick a crewmate if there is only one correct crewmate choice for each mission? It gets really annoying shuffling through each one of them everytime until you find the correct one. And when by accident picking the wrong crew member, why can’t I go back and pick the correct one?

The characters are really well crafted in this game, especially considering what this game is. You’ve got multiple different characters of different species with different personalities and visual features, all coming together really well. When it comes to crewmates, there is a total of 10 that can be unlocked in the game. Demi, Lily, Killi, Ela, Taron, Sova, Fortune, Huntress, Blythe and Fow-Chan. I still can’t believe that Empress Celestina isn’t the last crewmate and gets to keep her purity.

Every character in this game is fully voiced and the voice actors did a good job. It all sounds professional and high quality. The voice acting is actually the thing that brings this game to the top level. It is kind of crazy how much it adds to the immersion and quality of the game.

The Pandora is essentially the gallery. All the scenes from the main campaign will be playable here. There is however also a large amount of none mission scenes that can be unlocked here using “pooter points.” Each crewmate has her own points and they are earned through her leveling. You should be able to unlock all of the “pooter point scenes” with a girl once you hit around level 30 with her.

There is a wardrobe in this game, with unlockable haircuts and outfits you gain through leveling each girl. While this is a cool addition, the changes you make are pretty useless, since pretty much all of the clothing options are unlocked at the very end of the game, when your crewmates are near or at max level, long after you finished the main campaign.

I honestly think the price is fine and I find this game slightly underrated. It is a big game in a genre of games that never sees projects of this size and it seems to have been made by a proper studio. There also are no microtransactions, which is a huge win for this game. Most games in this genre and style are riddled with paywalls in all types of progression and rewards. In the 30 hours I played I had one crash and there was an autosave that saved me, not bad at all.

I did not know anything about this game before hand, so it blew me away how big it actually is and how many scenes of all different kinds were made for this game. It took me 30 hours to complete pretty much everything the game had to offer and I paid 15 bucks for it. To me that is a good deal, especially for a game of this quality. The ending of the game is setting it up for a sequel to be possible, but I don’t know if we ever will get one. If we do though, I will definitely buy it!
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Help me out by following my Curator, I’d really appreciate it!!