Diablo 2 full game free download

See how far Diablo II has evolved with the legacy toggle, for a before-and-after real-time comparison with the classic game with added support for modern screen resolutions and surround sound. Kingdoms Of Amalur Re-Reckoning. Scavenge materials and craft tools. Delivered by FeedBurner. Telephone Your telephone number is opetional.

Search for:. Download Here Help Center. Share this post Digg Tweet Stumbleupon delicious reddit Facebook. Related Posts. V Build Unlimited Edition. Equip your character with it and smile proudly as his or her head is encased in an animal skull. Weapons, shields and helms can also hold gems, the condition of which and the type will help influence its attributes.

Aside from the relatively similar look and feel of the game to the original, there isn't much to criticize. One particularly irksome feature, however, is the inventory management or lack thereof. Trying to fit all your wonderful toys into specific slots takes a degree of micromanagement that becomes rather cumbersome as time wears on.

Also, multiplayer games were particularly difficult to join during the first month of release, but the promise of a cheat-free experience was well worth the wait. Up to eight companions can now play a game without the fear of dreaded ghosts, town-killers or other unsavory types looking to spoil a perfectly good dungeon romp. All in all, Diablo II is certainly a worthy sequel to a title that excels at being one of the hardest games to stop playing.

Those looking for detailed character and party management as well as a more intricate storyline and rewarding single-player experience should probably wait for Baldur's Gate II. But those who just want to get their licks in without committing significant hours of time will find Diablo II to be one of the more addictive games of Graphics: The sprite-based graphics are not the game's strongest point, especially considering the release date. Still, there are some nice spell effects and the environments are well detailed.

Blizzard have also already hinted that they hope to release expansion packs that will add more quests to the game. There will be five all-new character classes with unique attributes and abilities Amazon, Paladin, Necromancer, Barbarian and Sorceress , and 'Skill Trees' unique to each class have been developed to drip special powers and abilities to you as you progress through the story. The skill your character specialises in determines how you get to distribute level-up points.

If you choose to go one way with attack skills, you'll be able to gain certain abilities, but others will be more difficult to obtain because of that decision. It will not be possible to learn each and every skill, so each character will be forced to specialise. Pretty much everything your party wears and uses is shown on screen in minute detail. Blizzard's art department have produced a great deal of significant work recently.

Although a good proportion of it is still under wraps we don't want to ruin it for you now, do we? Attention to detail is something that Blizzard have been renowned for in the past, and Diablo II promises to continue that trend. Atmospheric effects such as night and day cycles, rain and fog are in there, as are leaves blowing in the breeze, livestock moving from field to field, and rivers flowing in an eerily realistic manner.

A lot of the monsters too are not only better looking, but also bigger and badder. Take the Blunderbore, for example: a desert-faring beast with a tiny head and huge body. Or the Gargantuan Beast: a big, hairy monster which crushes opponents with its hands. And there's a boatload of other scary creatures. All have improved artificial intelligence, and some are now capable of working together and hunting in packs. As if it wasn't hard enough before In the end there's no doubting Diablo IPs potential.

As long as we don't end up with a buggy first release, Diablo II could well end up being one of the slickest games ever made. Even the menus look sexy, sleek and superbly designed. Blizzard know what they've got, know the people who want it, and arc promising to deliver early next year. And, providing we're not eating our words thanks to 'slippage' come next November, will be the first to playtest it for you.

Watch out for a full review and a final verdict soon. In a nutshell, here's what Diablo 2 is all about As the game opens, the hero after containing Diablo's spirit in the first game journeys to the East and assumes Diablo's original appearance and power.

He then marches oft to raise an army to aid him in his conquest of the world. Diablo's plans unveil as the game progresses: he's attempting to free his brothers, Baal the Lord of Destruction and Mephisto the Lord of Hatred , in order to reinstate the triumvirate of evil.

What this means in gaming terms is that you're in deep trouble and must hack up loads of monsters to prevent the bad guys from winning. The original Diablo was a phenomenal success. The graphics were simple, the gameplay was even simpler and the story was virtually nonexistent. But somehow, thanks to the delicately balanced difficulty level in the single-player game and the immense popularity of the multiplayer aspect with the hardcore online community, Diablo was a winner. With such a big audience waiting to eat it up, there's no denying that this sequel will be another success.

But it won't necessarily be winning any fans among the critics of the original. If you're not expecting much more than Diablo 1. Blizzard knows exactly what its fans want: the same, only much more of it. This would be fine if the sequel had been released two or three years ago but, viewed now, Diablo II looks positively lame. Graphically there's only minimal improvement.

The resolution is tirmly stuck in a x sprite time warp and the animation is jerky and clumsy. In fact, it doesn't look any better than, say, Fallout 2, another isometric RPG released a couple of years ago. Alright, so it's brighter and more colourful and it uses your 3D card to make some of the spells slightly spectacular. So some of the monsters are a lot bigger than before and you can have more of them on-screen. So what? But then Blizzard has never dazzled us in the graphics area.

Nor has it had to. WarCraft was an incredibly successful RTS, but nothing special to look at. One of the reasons is that its games are only very secondarily single-player experiences. Undemanding graphics mean that online play is always smooth, which it's why it's mostly American players who lap its games up. But that's no excuse for letting Diablo II look like such a complete dog. Core Design keep flogging us the same game, but at least every instalment of Tomb Raider looks much better than the previous one.

And some of the biggest online games, Allegiance and EverQuest for instance, show that you can still have great graphics and play smoothly over the Net. Still, the old adage goes that it's gameplay and not graphics that counts.

While Diablo II is still a simple game - involving not much more than straightforward sword-hacking and spell-casting - it is definitely more complex than the first one.

There are improvements that were blindingly obvious necessities, such as the ability to run or being able to keep the mouse button pressed for continuous movement, rather than constantly pointing and clicking. There is a stamina bar that decreases rapidly as you run to stop you from constant flight. This is a combat game after all. The interface works well. Here, once again, simplicity is the key and there's no reason to mess about with a tried and tested format that people feel extremely comfortable using.

The main improvements are the number of character classes now available Necromancer, Paladin, Amazon, Barbarian and Sorceress and the branching skill trees each of them has. As you gain experience points you can choose to spend them building up your stats or acquiring new special abilities and powering them up.

Traditionally, only spell-casting characters have had this element of skill exploration, with mages discovering all sorts of new spells and warriors condemned to ham up their strength and dexterity. In Diablo 2, all the characters have skills they can acquire and explore, making experience point-spending a much more interesting facet. Another way of spending your money is hiring team-mates at towns to fight alongside you.

You'll normally find a rogue or mercenary boss who sells you one of his warriors in much the same way that the blacksmith sells you his weapons. Each warrior has their own attributes, so the more money you spend, the better a fighter you'll get. You can only have one of these oafs with you at any one time, although they will fight till the bitter end. As you'd expect, they're not known for their intelligence and will be content to throw themselves with wild abandon against any enemy that comes into sight.

At least they're better than the sidekicks in Daikatana. Each portion of dungeon is tiny compared to the sprawling levels found in the original. You are led down restrictive corridors much more and there is hardly any real exploration involved.

On the other hand, the outdoor levels are wildly open and can leave you wandering around for ages before you find what you're looking for. There is a wider variety of styles compared to the first game, with Egyptian backgrounds competing with the more common grey dungeons and castles, but the random plan creation clearly limits the quality of design. The randomness adds a lot to the replayability value, but do you really need it? After all, the game is absolutely massive, requiring an insane amount of hours to complete.

And, if you want to try out all the classes, the time is multiplied. So why choose random, simplistic and almost empty maps instead of specifically created ones, apart maybe from the advantage of more unpredictable multiplayer games? Not only are the dungeons created randomly, so are the towns and forests, so you can be sure to be stepping into, if not a completely different wortd, at least a less predictable environment.

Diablo II really is truly huge. Unlike its sprite-driven graphics, it is a game of monstrous proportions, easily three times bigger than the original. There are four towns which the quests are launched from divided into three acts and plenty of roaming wilderness, as well as the unavoidable dungeons.

For such a plain-looking game, though, there's not an awful lot of interaction with the precious little environment to be found.

The Ultima series at its height always created simple but loglstically real worlds to explore. Diablo seems bent on its one-dimensionality. The legions of fans demand little more than straightforward hack and slash, and Blizzard certainly hasn't gone out of its way to provide much else.

One of the biggest attractions of Diablo has always been the anal obsession with character building, maxing out all your stats, levelling up, getting more money and buying better weapons and armour. We could go off on a tangent about this numerical fixation being a metaphor for consumerist society, but we won't.

There is, however, little doubt that the single-player game would have been left largely untouched by the hardcore Diablettes had you not been able to transport your character from your solo game to the multiplayer arena. In the same way that the ancient Gauntlet of which this is a direct successor was OK on your own but an absolute classic when your friends joined in, Diablo really comes into its own online. We'll be reviewing the multiplayer side of it in our Online section in the very near future, when the community really kicks off.

Blizzard is sure to address many of the problems people found first time round, not least of which was the rife cheating, where players would bump up their statistics into stratospheric numbers and proceed to murder any other player that should cross their path. Despite all the criticisms, if Diablo 2 is essentially the same game with knobs on, it can't be all that bad.

And it isn't. The gameplay is just as undemandingly addictive as ever, you can still choose the level of difficulty that suits you, and there's still a strange satisfaction to be had from levelling up and bringing down a large creature with a stroke of lightning or a mighty swing of the axe.

But, for all that this sequel has added, there is still something sorely missing. It has no sense of atmosphere and feels more like a heartless expansion pack. I remember playing Diablo and reaching one of the first bosses, a mad demonic butcher, with arms as wide as cows and a disturbing aura of evil. I sauntered wildly through the dark dungeon, my racing heart willing my character to move faster, chased by this maniac and stumbling across horribly mutilated corpses broken in a puddle of blood you could almost smell.

There is nothing like this here. Even when you see bodies impaled in a macabre landscape, you feel no quickening of the pulse, no terrified awe, you just click on them to see if there's any money hidden in them. You find hideously powerful creatures later in the game, but none have the presence to really scare you.

No doubt all you true Diablo heads out there will violently disagree with me and demand my head on a stake, but you will have already bought the game and played it to death anyway without the need of any vindication from our pages. We're sure you'll enjoy it immensely.

The rest of us, however, will turn our thoughts to a world of ever-progressing, ever-deepening, ever-evolving computer games. Vampire may be done and dusted, but there is the sheer majesty of the crowning masterpiece of role-playing, Deus Ex, to look forward to now. It may not seem like too big a deal, but the jump from three character classes to five is made all the more important by the subtle effects on gameplay each of them has.

Many of the differences are merely in the head of the player because there's not much variety in the way the game progresses by chomping through legions of monsters with swords or spell-cast snowballs. But there's enough to make you want to try out every character, and to level at least a couple of them up enough to see what they can really do. Somehow this lucky jungle woman has kept both her breasts intact, which makes it hard to see how she can be so accurate with her bow and arrow.

Of course, their mono-breastedness is far from being a proven historical fact, but there is definitely a distinct lack of horse riding bow-leggedness, or indeed of any horses. What you will get with the Amazon is great skill with the spear and arrows. The obvious advantage over a Barbarian or a Paladin is that you can conduct ranged attacks, thus keeping harmful creatures at bay long enough to split their heads open.

You'll need more than a sharp and thin piece of wood to get rid of the bigger enemies. Or when you're facing a screen full of smaller ones, which is why you can acquire your own special abilities, you can turn your arrows into incredibly powerful magical weapons. You can also summon a muscular Valkyrie to fight with you. If the Valkyrie is not entirely to your liking, perhaps too lively and healthy-looking, then the powers of this corpse-lover may be more up your dark and twisted alley.

The macabre Necromancer is rarely alone and is capable of summoning skeletons and golems from the fallen bodies of slain monsters. This is unquestionably the character to play if you want to give the game the sinister edge it lacks, but it's still not as darkly evil as we'd like it to be. Raising skeletons loses its charm after a while, but there are other spells like the one making corpses explode in the face of your enemies, or the one that traps them in a bone prison.

No RPG is complete without one of these muscly, brainless and unexciting characters. In Diablo II be comes in the bald and ethnic variety rather than the dark and hairy Conan-clone shape. He's also capable of carrying weapons in both hands, turning him into a real meat-grinder.

If you thought the lawnmower at the end of Peter Jackson's Brain Dead was an effective weapon, wait till you see the Barbarian's double-hatchet wrist action. To make the character more interesting he also has his very own special skills tree. Since he's so much of an animal that he can't articulate words properly, most of these skills are in the form of battle-cries and work in a similar way to spells.

You can use them to strike terror into the heart of enemy creatures or make you momentarily stronger. There are other skills, such as the useful but hilarious Leap Attack, where he prances about like a ballet dancer, or the whirlwind one, where he turns into a deadly Warner Bros Tasmanian Devil, whizzing around the screen. As with most RPGs, the truly magical character is the weakest to begin with but by far the strongest once you have enough experience.

There is a large contingency of fans whose sole purpose in life is to cast more and more powerful spells and who are only fulfilled when the palms of their hands are crackling with a freshly cast electric bolt. If you're one of them, then the Sorceress will be your character of choice.

Her skill tree is the most rewarding and, when you reach the higher echelons, there is very little that can stand in your way. The downside is that her spells are the most familiar and least original, with the usual fare of firewalls, lightning bolts and meteor storms. You do get to summon a hydra to fight with you though.

The Paladin is a righteous but fascinating figure, combining the faith of a monk, the honour of a samurai and a shiny silver armour suit. If you already liked Diablo II then without a doubt, you will freak out and have awesome time with Lord of Destruction.

The story of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is awesome and actually way deeper and more interesting than you may expect from an expansion. It adds a brand new act onto Diablo II. You may wonder how you carry on after what happened with Diablo at the end of the main game. However, things are not good as the brother of Diablo , Baal is causing havoc and you need to head to the lands of the Barbarians, destroy the World Stone and save the day.

I thought the story was awesome and actually, they could have maybe even made a full-on game about this concept. While the story is great, an expansion really is only as good as the extra content that it is bringing to the dance. Getting two new classes to play as was awesome and I actually played through the whole act as both classes.

That is not all. Diablo II: Lord of Destruction also gives you lots of new enemies and skills. You can really get in there deep and customize your character just the way you want.

The amount of time you can spend playing with the runes and getting the character you really want is just insane! It really is quite impressive the amount of new content in addition to the story and classes that the game has.

It plays like a charm and I think one of the main things that so many people love about this game is that it is easy for new players to figure out. On the flip side of that, you can really master this game and become an epic warrior!

While I enjoyed playing the game in single-player, playing with a couple of friends is an experience I will always remember. It is cool how they will let you play with 7 other warriors. So if you have enough friends, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction can be quite the amazing multiplayer experience for all those involved. I would bet many people have just ignored this well those new to the series and just jump into Diablo III.

That is a huge mistake as Lord of Destruction is a wonderful experience that may not be super long, but it is an experience that is well worth having.