Diablo 2 - Bestseller Series for Windows

Diablo 2 does very well as a sequel to the phenomenally popular Diablo. The reason I am not giving it a higher rating lies in the fact that other games now on the market offer greater immersion and replayability than the content-thin point-and-click style of the Diablo franchise. If you are looking for a game to spend weeks playing, or a game with a lot of social interaction, you may want to try a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) like Everquest or Asheron's Call; if you just want a quick and dirty hack-and-slash game, Diablo 2 may be your game.

I'm going to make a list of the Pros and Cons; if the "Cons" aren't things that would bother you, then maybe you will like the game more than I did; it's really a matter of individual taste.

Pro:

- Updated, accelerated graphics
- More colors and more types of terrain to fight in, not just a big dungeon
- Larger Maps
- Greater variety of monsters
- Always the chance to get better loot; some of the better items only drop at the higher difficulty levels
- Wide variety of treasure; new "rare" items can have several random magical properties; "sets" increase in power once you obtain all the items in a given set
- Gambling provides a fun use for your spare gold
- Improved quest system; quests are available even in multiplayer/battle.net games
- Secure characters on battle.net greatly reduces hacking/cheating, the bane of Diablo 1
- Internet play on battle.net is smooth and lag free (though it had severe problems for a while after release)
- New character types, new skills; skill tree allows customization of character beyond just stats.
- Up to 8 players can play in one game
- PvP system improved (though the player combat itself still needs work). Since players can only become "hostile" toward you while they are in town, you no longer have to worry about getting killed out of the blue; you will be warned whenever a player in town enables the switch that lets allows him to attack you.
- logging in and starting a game online is much quicker than with many online games.
- stable; bugs are very rare and are not game-threatening
- good cutscenes which help to advance the plot

Con:

- Not much incentive to play cooperatively most of the time
- 3rd person view makes game less immersive and gives it a "cartoony" feel
- Classes and skills somewhat unbalanced; Paladins are the hardest class to play by far. PvP suffers as a result.
- "Quests" are usually nothing more than getting to the end of the small dungeons so you can get to the boss in the big dungeon
- Game is fairly short; amount of content is much smaller than in other games like Deus Ex, Everquest, Might and Magic VIII, etc.
- Even with new skills, the game requires little thought or strategy; it's just point, click, kill. This gets old very quickly for some people.
- Some slowdowns and pauses in the game (see my system specs); CD spins continually by design.
- plot is somewhat predictable and unimportant, which hurts the single player game