The Weight of the Evade
The first thing I test in an isometric action game is the dodge button. In Diablo® IV, the spacebar evade has real weight. You do not just glide across the floor like a hovercraft. Your character drops low, pushes off dirt or cracked stone, and takes just long enough to recover that bad timing gets you clipped by a cleaver. That small delay matters. It turns mob control into a rhythm game where spacing actually counts.
Playing a heavy melee build out of the five classes showed me how tight the hit registration is. When a heavy hammer swing collides with three skeletons, the impact stops briefly on the first bone before crunching through the rest. Blizzard dialed back the floaty bounce from older titles. Swings look brutal, bodies tear apart along exact contact lines, and you can tell where a monster weapon hitbox starts before it hits the mud.
Butchering Cultists Across Sanctuary
The story path puts Lilith front and center, sending you across ruined towns and muddy plains as her cultists slaughter their way toward hellish rituals. The dark atmosphere works because the combat matches it. Encounters do not drag. You kick through a door, drop an area crowd-control stun, and pick off stragglers with quick lunges.
Animation canceling is strict here. If you commit to a big strike, you are locked into the windup until the damage registers. That means you cannot mash attack keys blindly without eating damage from elite monster modifiers. The English voice acting and clean interface text keep the briefing sequences punchy, so you get right back to cutting through drowned corpses on the coast.
Helltides and Open Map Encounters
Sanctuary opens up fast once you leave the tutorial peaks. Running into random open-world skirmishes alongside stranger parties works well, aided by built-in cross-play that fills fields with active brawlers without tanking input response. The map regularly lights up with Helltides, turning entire sub-zones blood red and dumping waves of tough demons right on top of you.
World Bosses test your dodge cooldowns more than regular trash mobs. These giants swing wide sweeping arcs that force you to watch floor telegraphs instead of your skill bar. My only real gripe in these massive fights is camera distance. When twelve players dump elemental spells on the screen at once, tracking small melee recovery animations gets tricky.
The Grind for Steel at the Forge
Down in the dungeons, monster drops come quick and fill your bags. You take rare weapons to the Forge to temper them, reroll stats, and imprint legendary aspects that alter how your skills behave. The progression loop feels rewarding because a good weapon roll immediately changes how fast your basic strikes chew through elite health bars.
At $49.99 on Steam, this is a massive package that nails the core feeling of hand-to-hand carnage. A few dungeon layouts get repetitive after twenty hours, and finding the right balance between raw damage output and defensive armor takes trial and error. But when your blade catches three demons mid-lunge and shatters them instantly, the action speaks for itself.
Comments 21
BestNewest★ Best comments
tbh the evade roll is the only thing saving this lol
am i bad at this or is the RNG personally offended by me?
How many hours to roll credits before the seasonal stuff kicks in? ... Asking because I have zero tolerance for dailies masquerading as endgame.
Ngl the combat carries this hard because the story feels pretty half-baked. Going for a darker tone is cool and all, but it doesn't make up for how thin the plot actually is.
Diablo walks into a bar... bartender says "why the long face?" ... he says "just farming Helltides for three hours and got absolute garbage" ... no spoilers but that RNG really tests my patience
How many hours to roll credits before the seasonal stuff kicks in? ... Asking because I have zero tolerance for dailies masquerading as endgame.
tbh the evade roll is the only thing saving this lol
looked incredible until hour five.
@Cereal Killerur not wrong rn hour five is where the repetition kicks in bc the dungeon layouts recycle hard
@ciao_tonytbh the dungeon layouts repeat way too fast lol
diablo's dark vibe hits harder than my dad jokes
feels like paying for a cheap pub burger
Refunded before I even finished the first dungeon crawl.
@possum_81Proper rough start mate ... the visual clutter in those Helltides gets proper disorienting when you're trying to read recovery frames ...
am i bad at this or is the RNG personally offended by me?
proper classic vibe that mate reminds me of the good old days when manuals actually told you something useful not just a QR code and a legal disclaimer the evade roll looks decent but the visual clutter in big fights is a proper headache reckon they'll sort it
@peter griffins kneemate are we reviewing the game or the manual binding quality because my copy came with a folded map and zero QR codes lol
reminds me of dorm nights back in '99 (on the old Trinitron we hauled up three flights of stairs) (the RA never caught us)
@prost_marktbh the combat was fine lol but the RNG feels personal
@prost_marky'all talking dorm nights and Trinitrons meanwhile I'm fixin to lose my mind just trying to find a quiet corner to check my inventory without a World Boss spawning on my head ... feels like grocery shopping with twins screaming for cereal except the cereal is loot drops and the twins are random monsters
@yepTakes me back to college dorm nights in '99 on an old flickering Trinitron CRT where sorting your inventory was basically a whole mini game by itself.
tbh looks fun lol
@crumpetyou bookmark threads for games you hate lol (respect the consistency)
@crumpetjust focus on your dodge rolls and hitbox timing