Mush
2022-06-07 02:24:50
The settings menu is a pleasant surprise for a mobile game. It is very straightforward, allows you to customize your experience to what you want, while preventing less-experienced players from tanking their performance with too demanding settings. The device load bar underneath shows you in real time what impact the changes will have on your phone, and some settings are blocked if you don’t meet the minimum requirements— 30fps was the only option on my Xiaomi and Ultra resolution wasn’t available on either phone I tried.
There were some drops below 30 in specific gameplay sequences, but for the most part the game played smoothly at 30fps, which isn’t a bad experience on a screen as small as that of a phone. It also looked great for a mobile game on its bare minimum settings.
UI and customization
The UI has everything you’d need to look at. Given the small screen-space, gameplay is rarely obscured— the camera is always centered on your character, you attack around you so you’ll mostly be focusing on the center of your screen— and they let you opt for smaller icons if you prefer. You have HP, XP, Skills, quest log (which can be closed), minimap, menu, inventory, phone battery, connection quality and time.
The UI approach is quite smart because it translates just as well to a controller setup. Nothing changes visually, except your skill icons will have their respective button underneath. You still need to have them there to check the cooldowns, so it is a good approach. Having no dedicated map or quest log button is a bit of a hassle— the only way to interact with those while using a controller is pressing the Right D-pad to bring up a cursor which you control with your analog stick— but you can just use the touch screen to do that. In fact, you can interchange at any time between controller and touchscreen while playing on mobile, a neat detail.
Controller support works just as well on PC, with even more controllers available (full list of controllers supported per platform). You can switch between M+KB or controller at any time but that obviously isn’t as practical as just touching an icon on your phone.
Gameplay
Playing Diablo Immortal feels quite good. It is very similar to Diablo 3 when you are inside a dungeon, Elder Rift or Challenge Rift, gameplay is smooth on all supported inputs (touch-screen, controller, M+KB) and you can change most of your keybinds. The game looks great on both platforms and the open-world aspect seems like a good fit.
If you’ve played Lost Ark, you will find a lot of similarities when it comes to the MMO side of the game. Zones are entirely self-contained, wrapped up by a dungeon but with a lot more content to go through later on. There’s a Codex to complete and each area has an Exploration % on the Achievements tab with World bosses and secret dungeons (Hidden Lairs) to complete. Content is not something Diablo Immortal lacks.
These are the specifications for running Diablo Immortal on PC. Interestingly, they mention 1080p as the minimum display resolution. The thing is, it doesn’t go higher than that. They didn’t even bother creating a resolution choice on the PC version, even though they have one for mobile. You can only choose between windowed, windowed fullscreen or fullscreen. I played it on a 1440p monitor and the fullscreen and windowed fullscreen options were just a stretched 1080p window which looked incredibly blurry.
The PC settings are essentially the same as the mobile ones, with the exception of the resolution change. It does its job, especially since we all know the PC port was added very late into development primarily to allow PC-Mobile crossplay and to appease the fanbase, but I’d hope that resolution choice is implemented when 1.0 comes out. As of right now, Diablo Immortal looks pretty good on a 1080p screen, but anything above that will look blurry.
UI and customisation- non-existent
The UI looks exactly the same as the mobile version. As I’ve mentioned before, I think it works well for that specific platform and it even works well on PC, if you are using a controller. If you are playing M+KB it is terrible. You cannot change the size of the icons or where they are, they are way too big and the fact that they didn’t even bother copy-pasting the classic Diablo UI for M+KB players is yet another sign of a PC-port which was done as an afterthought.
Diablo Immortal allows you to change between two minimap sizes and that’s it. No other UI customisations are allowed. So when you play the game on PC you will immediately tell that everything you’re seeing was built for a touch-screen which you literally can’t use. Menus are convoluted and clunky and, frankly, seem like a failed attempt at making something work for every possible input instead of letting players customize their own setups.
Repetition and recycling
Very little here is new. There are no new classes, most skills are exact copies of their Diablo 3 counterparts or slight changes to them (often to make them easier to use on mobile), dungeons look very similar to previous games in the franchise and a lot of NPCs and enemies are reused. The content is still good, but for a game that has been in development for so long (announced in 2018) the amount of recycling feels a bit cheap. Even more so when we get to the third and final part of our article, “the ugly”.