Diablo II: Resurrected – Infernal Edition

I’m writing this review after only a relatively short amount of playtime because I already spent countless hours with the original Diablo II back when I was a teenager. And because of that, I can confidently say this: Diablo II: Resurrected IS Diablo II. Not a modern reinterpretation, not a “reimagining,” not a heavily altered remake, it is fundamentally the exact same game, just wrapped in an incredible visual overhaul with some genuinely useful quality-of-life improvements. Before I get into all the things I love about it, I want to address one issue that genuinely frustrated me: In my experience, the Battle.net servers are surprisingly unstable. I repeatedly lost connection while playing online, which caused progress loss, areas to regenerate, and portals to disappear entirely. Having to replay entire sections because the game disconnected is incredibly frustrating. It got bad enough that I stopped during Act II and created a completely new offline character instead, since I mainly want to experience the game solo anyway. What makes this even more annoying is that, as far as I know, there’s no way to transfer an online character to offline mode. That feels like a really unnecessary limitation. If you plan to play solo from start to finish, I honestly recommend starting offline immediately to avoid the headache. I also don’t realistically expect Blizzard to significantly improve the servers at this point after all these years. Battle.net obviously still makes sense for multiplayer players, but solo players may genuinely have a better experience offline. Outside of this issue, though, I honestly have almost nothing but praise for this game. It’s genuinely impressive how well Diablo II has aged, especially if you prefer slower-paced and more atmospheric ARPGs. I also enjoy modern games like Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2, but those games often become way too chaotic for my taste. Endless visual effects, constant explosions, enemies dying before you can even properly register what they are. Sometimes it feels more like visual noise than combat. One of the biggest things I appreciate today is that the game simply wants to be a game. No endless seasonal pressure. No in-game shop constantly begging for attention. No battle passes. No menus filled with pop-ups and notifications trying to pull you into ten different systems at once. The actual gameplay experience remains the main focus, and that feels almost refreshing nowadays. Blizzard also did an excellent job preserving the atmosphere of the original. The visual overhaul looks fantastic while still respecting the dark identity of Diablo II. Being able to instantly switch between the original graphics and the remastered visuals is also an amazing touch and really shows how much respect went into this remake. Despite the technical issues I mentioned earlier, I’m genuinely having just as much fun with Diablo II again as I did many years ago.