Author Archives: Dan Stapleton

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Nothing more than a coat of fresh paint over the old masterpiece, Diablo 2: Resurrected is a curious piece of video game restoration. After a hundred hours smashing demons, I’ve kicked Diablo to the curb a couple times and I’m thoroughly reacquainted with the good and the bad that the most revered game in Blizzard’s action RPG series has to offer. As someone who played more than my fair share of Diablo 2 between 2000 and 2007, Resurrected absolutely scratches an itch for the golden age of this genre. At the same time, it’s blatantly a game from an era where the demands on our time were very different than what we’ve seen in the past decade. In the face of concessions that modern games have made towards fun, Diablo 2’s insistence on grind and unforgiving systems and 20-year-old bugs can just make me feel… tired. Satisfied, but tired.

What doesn’t age? The mood. The completely redone graphics of Resurrected do so much more than a simple homage to the original game, adding a whole third dimension as well as 4K-friendly environment details that were just out of the question in the 800×600 2D graphics of 2000. Locations like the Monastery Gates in Act 1, an outdoor area that was always a bit weird from an isometric point of view, now have visible roofs on the buildings instead of just a black sea beyond the walls. There’s a wealth of detail in every scene, in the monsters, and in character models, that really makes me appreciate the ability to dynamically switch between the old and new graphics to see the contrast.

Beautifully, when you switch to the classic graphics you switch to the original sound as well, though the difference is nowhere near as stark here because it didn’t need any significant updating. Aside from a bit of remastering it is identical to the original, and it’s still phenomenal. The ping when a gem hits the floor, the whirl of weapons, and the guttural demon voices (“Rakanishu!”) are iconic sound design. This is not to mention the remasters of the classic soundtrack, or the new remixes, which are beautiful work. (The voice acting, well… let’s just say it was a different time. At least Deckard Cain and Tyrael are great – oh, and Baal in the expansion. That awful laugh still creeps right up under my skin.)

In the “aged, but mostly gracefully” column we have the arc of Diablo 2’s story, which is good, but it’s not as good as I fondly remembered. The first two acts are really fun, and each quest is a dark, gothic fantasy vignette, while Act 3 is a great sprawling jungle crawl with lots of little dungeons sprinkled around. Act 4, however, is boring as dirt. The NPCs don’t have any flavor dialogue, let alone personality, while the quests and the areas are entirely linear. I have no idea how a story about invading Hell itself could be boring, but Diablo 2 somehow did it. Thankfully, things pick up again with the Lord of Destruction expansion’s Act 5. It’s a bit rushed, but it’s a good time.

I chose a Paladin from the seven available classes as my first character for my grand return to Diablo 2. This is because for two decades I’ve maintained a personal grudge against the dung beetle soldiers in Act 2 – you know, the ones that poop lightning when you hit them. The Paladin’s lightning resistance aura allows me to laugh in their faces and kill them in humiliating ways, and it’s been everything I thought it could be.

That’s part of the charm of Diablo 2, and it’s still great design today. Some enemies are just immune to certain damage types, forcing you to diversify your build (or your co-op party). Others will burn out your mana in seconds, meaning spellcasters have to keep their distance while melee has to figure out how to win without active abilities. There’s masochistic joy in overcoming the escalating challenges, especially when the escalation goes exponential as you break into Nightmare and Hell difficulties for character levels 30 to 99 or so. There’s no shame if you’ve had your fill before then and tap out, or start a new character for a fresh run, but Diablo 2 keeps on giving if you do.

The heart of Diablo 2 is still the multiplayer. Singleplayer is a fun dungeon crawl, but the difficulty and action feels best when you’ve got others along. Cooperative PvE runs to defeat bosses and farm good loot are where Resurrected shines most. The loot system is unreliable and random, assuming that players will trade items across games and characters to get what they need. The new, larger shared stash helps you do that, a small update that supports the original game rather than changing it. Building synergetic characters with a regular group is really rewarding, and classes like Paladin and Assassin only truly shine in a crew.

There’s also PvP, a niche and extremely hardcore Diablo 2 scene that’s already starting to reestablish itself with its winner-take-all brawls. Personally, I fear these people, but I’ve already seen some impressive collections of ear trophies and unique weapons on social media.

Some of the mechanical ideas feel old-school relative to how things are done in action RPGs these days, but that doesn’t make them bad. For instance, you only get two active skills at once. It seems archaic – and it is – but what was a technical and game design constraint at the time is pretty fun when you get past the clunkiness. You have to choose skills carefully, as having too many might just give you a huge toolkit you’re not fast enough to use. There’s a lot of juggling between powers. I like to smash my Paladin into the enemy packs with a Charge before switching to Zeal for a series of rapid blows, or Vengeance for elementally infused strikes that take down monsters resistant to physical attacks. For tough elite groups, I’ll switch weapons and throw gas grenades to weaken them before I head in. All the while I’m swapping auras from attack speed to elemental resistances as I need them and keeping my holy shield buff up every 30 seconds.

I also picked up a cool polearm-wielding desert mercenary sidekick. If you need any indication that it’s very much still Diablo 2 under all of these fancy graphics, don’t worry: He’s still stupid as a sack of bricks and gets stuck on walls constantly. That’s one of those date technical issues that might have been addressed.

There’s no shortage of options for skills and abilities, and part of the delight of Diablo 2 is that it has a skill tree system you can use to build some truly strange characters. It’s flexible enough that you can make ranged builds for the melee characters, like a crossbow Paladin that shoots explosive bolts. How about a Barbarian focused on the War Cry skill, who just runs around shouting until everything dies? How about a Sorceress who enchants weapons rather than nukes enemies from a distance? I’ve always wanted to try and make a Necromancer tank, personally – maybe I’ll finally get around to it.

There’s a ton of freedom… that is, if you’re willing to discard 20 years of accumulated Diablo 2 wisdom and take your chances. In many ways this game is “solved,” in that the best builds and their precise itemization have been thoroughly sussed out over the years. In other words, there are right and wrong decisions, but you won’t know that unless you look it up or spend a lot of time failing.

You’re welcome to play like it’s 2000 and not search out optimal builds, especially when playing on Normal. You can clear the campaign with pretty much anything if you’re dedicated enough, though once you’re in Hardcore or Hell difficulty melee characters are very dependent on getting good items to progress at any pace other than a snail’s.

However, while I’d normally encourage you to go in blind and experiment for yourself, I won’t in this case because some of Diablo 2’s design falls squarely into the “hasn’t aged well” category. For example, there are copious skill traps for new players, meaning that some abilities you might be tempted to choose don’t scale well past the early game, or aren’t useful unless you understand their synergies with other skills you won’t unlock until much later.

Additionally, some straight-up broken things, like the infamous Next Hit Always Misses bug, have been retained in the name of keeping the flavor of Diablo 2 the same as it’s always been – but that’s something few people know about unless they do their homework. Unfortunately, this faithfulness to the original’s bugs seems to be without limits: Skills like the Amazon’s Fend and Druid’s Fury are still bugged, breaking when interacting with other common mechanics. These are known, documented bugs that have locked off entire character skills for 20 years. Why are they still in this game? Wouldn’t it have been wonderful and fresh to let us explore that still-undiscovered country?

To its credit, it’s worth saying that I’ve encountered barely any new bugs specific to Resurrected, and those I have seen have been minor graphical glitches that don’t affect gameplay – things like doors that don’t change visually when opened but can still be passed through, or an object overlaying a texture strangely. Nothing out of the ordinary for a modern game.

I’m a little sad to see that Resurrected has retained Diablo 2’s arcane skill-reset system: You get just one respec per difficulty level, and the only way to get more is by farming the big bosses for rare items and then shoving them in your Horadric Cube. Unlimited respecs would’ve been a prime candidate for overhaul to make Resurrected more accessible to a new generation and mitigate the skill trap issue, and it’s something that could have been easily disabled for ladder play.

It’s a bit galling things like that weren’t addressed because the other big update in Resurrected is a similar quality-of-life change. Rather than picking up gold stack by stack, you instead automatically grab it when you pass by. There’s a difference between preserving the experience and maintaining a lack of respect for our time, and this change shows that a small tweak can go a long way towards removing tedium from the original game without ruining anything.

The moment-to-moment gameplay that made Diablo 2 legendary in its time, though, is completely unchanged. Exploration and combat still feel deeply familiar; it’s a festival of clicking (or, now, thumbsticking – great on both PC and console) where you want to go and hammering out hits on your enemies. It’s as wild and chaotic as an isometric action RPG ever is, but in the long view, over 20 years of game design innovation later, it’s also kind of… slow. Characters don’t move quickly, and running is limited by your stamina bar. Copious and consistent use of town portal scrolls (which both warp you back to base and let you return) generally avoids having to backtrack, but when you have to it’s annoying at best. Running also makes your character worse at blocking, if they have a shield.

Because of that, I didn’t make it out of Act 1 without looking up the combination of slotted runes that produces armor with a bonus to Run/Walk speed, if only for – again – my own quality of life. At times, Diablo 2 feels like fighting against bad game design from the late ‘90s, which could also be described as “the forces of Hell.” For example, loot in online multiplayer is shared so anybody in your party can pick it up if they get there first – which I’ve got nothing against – but the careful etiquette of who gets what isn’t reinforced by anything in the rules. I’ve already seen a lot of ninja-looting, and it sucks – and it’s exacerbated by controllers, which can ironically loot faster than mouse and keyboard setups.

Having to fight against the basic game mechanics like this isn’t fun in 2021, and it’ll be worse for new Diablo 2 players who expect this kind of thing to be dealt with by game designers instead of all of us deciding on unenforceable rules of etiquette.

I’ve got other problems, myself: How can Blizzard justify dropping support for LAN play? Why can’t I clone a multiplayer character into single-player? The latter is especially concerning, seeing as the servers have been temperamental at times and I’d rather not have to start from scratch when I want to play but the cloud doesn’t.

But none of those devils in the details has overcome the fact that it’s definitely fun. Diablo 2’s design has aged remarkably well as an example of a relatively uncomplicated isometric action RPG. Everyone has skills, yes, but they all interact with the same systems: Health, Mana, Stats. There’s no unique currency or meter to learn for every class, and combos are things you build rather than things you get from chains of esoteric item abilities and arcane end-game progression mechanics. It’s just a skill tree, a billion demons, and an infinite fountain of equipment. It is, as ever, a satisfying game.

It makes sense that Ember Lab, the developer of Kena: Bridge of Spirits, started out as an animation studio. Just looking at this gorgeous world and Pixar-esque character designs tells you that this is a team that has a ton of experience in making incredible digital works, including their Majora’s Mask fan film, Terrible Fate. While Bridge of Spirits’ gameplay doesn’t quite match the extraordinarily high bar set by its visuals for a number of reasons, including some bland storytelling and shallow progression, this 3D open-world action-adventure is still nonetheless an impressive achievement thanks to its exciting and deceptively simple combat and an excellent balance of action, puzzle solving, and platforming.

Kena is a Spirit Guide who helps spirits who are unable to move on to the next life, whether because of lingering guilt or unfinished business. The story follows her as she makes her way through a beautiful but dying land in search of its sacred mountain shrine, guiding the troubled spirits she finds along the way. Not enough good things can be said about the character designs, facial expressions, and animation in Bridge of Spirits, which do an amazing job of making everyone you meet immediately endearing – especially Kena herself.

She’s so likable, in fact, that it actually makes it a bit of a bummer that we never really get to learn all that much about her. You get hints of her background and history, but never anything that lets you get to know her in the same way you get to know the spirits and other characters that she ends up interacting with. It’s a shame because she’s the one we spend the most time with, and everything else about her is awesome and made me want to know more.

In many ways, Bridge of Spirits is a throwback to the classic 3D Zelda style of games of having a large overworld that’s split up into major zones, and then guiding you through them in a linear fashion. Each zone will then require you to collect X amount of Y item, fight a boss, and then snag an upgrade that lets you travel to and explore the next zone. It’s very simple and formulaic, but it works elegantly: each area is home to a corrupt spirit that Kena needs to save, and as you explore the region you meet other characters who were close to the spirit, learn about the history of how things went wrong for them, find their personal effects, watch flashbacks, and then everything culminates in a boss fight that ties a nice little bow on the story arc.

Combat, on the other hand, is absolutely nothing like Zelda’s. It’s fast-paced, deceptively simple, and surprisingly challenging on the normal difficulty level given its cutesy and colorful demeanor. You’ve got light attacks, heavy attacks, and the ability to use your staff as a bow for ranged attacks, and… that’s about it in terms of your primary offensive tools, from beginning to end. Combat options were so limited, in fact, that I actually was pretty let down in the early goings because most enemies could be killed with just one or two light attack combos, and I wasn’t given much reason to do anything else for a lot longer than I’d have liked in a game that only lasts about nine hours.

Some nuance is introduced in the form of your tiny and adorable Ghibli-esque sprites, unfittingly known as Rot. These little dudes aid you in battle by swarming an enemy and temporarily locking them down, giving you an opportunity to attack their weak points, or just focus on clearing out the surrounding enemies. The ability to command them is tied to an amusingly contextualized Courage Meter that builds up as you deal damage, emboldening them to put themselves in harm’s way to help you out.

What really redeems Bridge of Spirits’ combat is that after a while it begins to introduce new enemy types that strongly encourage you to change up your tactics and explore some of the subtleties of its limited tools. Whether that’s making use of your bow’s time slowdown by jumping into the air and aiming at hard-to-hit weak points, using a parry against an attack that’s difficult to dodge, or using your Rot to immobilize a tough enemy so you can attack them from behind. There’s an impressive amount of enemy variety, and once they started showing up to the party I felt like I was constantly being challenged by new and interesting scenarios. That’s exactly how it should be in a game like this.

You also have to manage your resources very carefully in battle once the difficulty starts to ramp up significantly later on in the campaign. Not only can you use Courage to lockdown enemies with the Rot, but you also need to use it to heal by cleansing specific areas in a fight. There’s rarely more than two of these healing spots in any given scrap were, which makes every bit of damage you take incredibly significant, and often you have to make the call of whether you want to use your courage to be able to survive another hit, or use it to cash in a bunch of damage on an immobile enemy or boss.

That said, it would have been nice to have a little more to do in a fight. Bridge of Spirts’ progression system doesn’t provide very many enticing options to evolve your fighting style, and made me feel pigeonholed in my approach to combat – especially because there’s one melee weapon, and that weapon never really got much better or different as I continued to play. You can upgrade your moves, but the impact of those upgrades is disappointing to say the least. Three of the four melee upgrades are abilities that feel like Kena should have from the outset (two dashing attacks and an overhead slam while in the air) the post-parry counterattack doesn’t feel much stronger than just attacking while the opponent is recoiling, and many other upgrades are just small and barely noticeable incremental improvements. I never once thought “It would be nice if I could fire five arrows instead of just four,” especially considering how fast arrows regenerate.

There are exceptions, of course: a charged bow shot that deals big damage at the cost of one bar of Courage, a slow hammer strike that could take out a group of enemies at once, and the ability to activate slow-mo while aiming without having to jump in the air were the kind of new techniques I was looking for more of. But aside from these, I never felt excited by upgrades because they rarely ever seemed like anything that would be especially useful or make combat any more fun.

Fighting baddies isn’t all you’ll be doing in Bridge of Spirits, and the fact that it balances combat, platforming, puzzle solving, and exploration so well is one of its strongest suits. You’re never doing any one thing for too long. After finishing up a challenging combat encounter, you’ll typically be challenged to solve some sort of puzzle to open the next area, sometimes commanding your small army of Rot like Pikmin to move objects in order to press down buttons, or give you a platform to stand on. Once you get the bomb powerup, you’ll regularly do fun platforming sequences where you must activate a series of platforms and figure out how to best get from point A to B before the platforms return to their natural states. And then on top of all of that, this is an open world with plenty of secrets hidden off the beaten path, though whether a majority of those secrets will be of interest to you is another story.

My one gripe about exploration and collectible hunting is that, with the exception of meditation spots ( which increase your max health) none of the collectibles really made much of an impact on my playthrough. For context, I’m someone that really doesn’t care all that much about cosmetics, which is why I never felt super compelled to seek out Bridge of Spirits’ collectibles when most of the time they just ended up being either new hats for my Rot or currency that I could use to buy more hats for my Rot. Sure, there are Cursed Chests, which are fun to track down because they force you to complete a combat challenge in order to open them – but it’s almost always disappointing when you go through a tough battle and your reward is… yet another a funny little hat to put on one of your funny little creatures. So I pretty quickly lost the motivation to do more of it.

One final area that deserves a special mention is the boss battles, which are some of the most intense and challenging I’ve fought all year. Every fight feels distinct, the big ones have appropriately epic music, and there are a lot of them too. Some of the smaller boss battles even wind up becoming regular enemies that you have to fight against later, and that’s a nice way to revisit some of the most fun and difficult fights.

A man and his adopted daughter find their way through a whimsical, post-apocalyptic landscape. Frying pan and psychic powers at the ready, they might stumble into saving the world as they explore it. With all the stylings of a retro JRPG, you might expect Eastward to play like one, but this chill action-adventure is more Zelda than Dragon Quest. John and Sam’s triumphs and mistakes take place in a charming pixel-art landscape that’s rich with lovely characters and intimately designed places. Even where the story dragged for a time, or the simplicity of the challenges felt patronizing, the parts of Eastward that spoke to me more than made up for them.

Our headliners are John – a silent protagonist wreathed in messy hair and a bushy beard – and Sam, an outrageously precocious girl with budding psychic powers and a penchant for getting the two into trouble. They’re lovable characters with a bushel of personality and a kind of timeless appeal. They set off from their home under dubious circumstances, and, eventually, find their way… eastward. I loved switching between the two as they travel through a cute but dangerous apocalyptic world of small towns and dam-cities. Along the way you play through discrete story chapters and explore the stories of the people you meet. There are a lot – a lot – of silly little minigames along the way. Baseball, river rafting, slot machines, and ever-present cooking.

The trek to the east is pretty linear, but the areas you explore are laid out like little dungeons, with curling paths to find your way through as you battle goofy monsters and solve simple puzzles. John does most of the fighting via simple but satisfying hack-and-slash action, but Sam’s powers – like freezing enemies inside big psychic bubbles – are useful for fights and vital for puzzles.

It took me a few more than 30 hours to beat the main quest, but I know there are secrets to explore and little NPC storylines I skipped over that are worth going back for. In fact, Eastward’s overall story is good enough that I’ve judiciously avoided spoilers in this review, to the point of being overly vague in some spots, but trust me, that’s for your benefit. There’s also a pretty detailed roguelite JRPG game-within-the-game, called Earth Born, to play – and it was fun enough that I spent about six additional hours on it.

Eastward’s real draw is its world. The vibrant pixel art landscapes are so creative and so packed with detail that I often found myself stopping to just look at a city street or a new railway station. Much of it is alive with little animations like running water, glinting metal, or spinning fans. I loved details like laundry on lines between buildings, boats overturned and made into houses, and countryside in the distance from train windows.

It’s a loving rendition of a world that’s somewhere between a Studio Ghibli film and a classic JRPG – Castle in the Sky meets EarthBound. It’s all overlaid with a pretty low-key soundtrack that’s nothing standout, but it’s good enough, with a variety of both instrumental and chiptune arrangements.

It’s not just the backgrounds that pop, though. The characters of Eastward have great sprites and animation that packs in a ton of personality. They’re a cast of well-designed weirdos who all have something unique going for them, which is an animated style that’s become all too rare. The style and personality of the people you meet differs wildly, varying from gruff ranch hands to a trio of lively aunties, a sleepy small-town mayor, or a cigar-puffing casino owner. That’s not to mention the circus performers, train conductors, conmen, and funky robots. (My favorite robot runs a construction company and has a bad hip.)

Little fetch quests make you run back and forth across the world, but that’s not so bad when that world is pretty. A lot of the best Eastward has to offer is just smiling at the guy meditating on a roof as you pass by his part of town. I’ve passed him a dozen times now; what is he doing up there? I don’t know. He’s happy. Dude’s just vibing and it’s nice.

It’s a relief that the world is so attractive and the characters are so appealing, because Eastward’s greatest weakness is its writing. Character dialogue is hit or miss, with more than a few cliche lines and real stinkers. I’m talking about unironic use of lines like “I’ve been running my whole life.” Frankly, it’s because the writing doesn’t know when to step back and let action or movement convey words. It uses two sentences when one would do – or, more often, one sentence when none would do. Dialogue that should pop up in the background – laughter, exclamations – is more often than not in a bubble that requires a button to progress. The only time I felt impatient or bored with Eastward was during the drawn-out dialogues.

Exploration and combat are a welcome break from all that staring and reading. Fights are simple, and most enemies can be easily defeated with judicious application of John’s frying pan. Everything else is susceptible to the neon-colored shotgun or flamethrower. There are lots of weird enemies though, like a giant frog person, tentacle plants, or ultra-tough zombies, and they’ve all got their own attack pattern – but I usually took them down the same way, no matter what they were. But let me be clear: Simple isn’t always bad. It was fun to weave around attacks, smack mutants with a pan, and blow them away with the shotgun.

It’s weird that while you swap to Sam pretty often to do puzzles, I rarely felt the need to use her in combat; her ability to put monsters in frozen bubbles comes in handy for a few things, but you don’t absolutely need it to win. If you had a psychic sidekick, wouldn’t you want her to do a bit more?

Likewise, it’s a bit of a downer that the puzzles Sam’s instrumental in solving are never too complex, only ever getting difficult when it’s a challenge of timing or skill – or to get at a few tricky hidden chests. Most often, you’ll have to notice something like a wall to blow down with a bomb, a puzzle of which cables to connect, or which obstacles to remove so a raft floats where you want it to. The harder puzzles will have a timing element – moving quickly after triggering a switch, or golf-swinging a bomb into a narrow opening from a moving platform. It’s not complex stuff.

The simplicity did bug me sometimes. While parts of the fighting are good in their straightforwardness, others are just basic. Partially it’s because the single-stick controls feel inadequate for aiming weapons. It’s fun to bash with a frying pan, not so fun to make sure the characters are both dodging incoming projectiles.

The relatively infrequent boss and miniboss fights are an exception there, requiring a bit of finesse and switching between both John’s weapons and Sam’s powers. I liked them a lot more than the platforming and puzzle bits, and a lot of them really tested my ability to use every tool in my arsenal for a clean victory. One in particular stands out, an enemy knocks away bombs that you try to place at a vulnerable point. To win, I needed a deft hand at dropping bombs as John, then to switch to Sam to use her powers to distract the enemy, then back to John to dish out damage after the bomb went off. That’s the kind of synergy Eastward’s combat needs more of.