Swinging back to a game you played on some other platform can be a chore. I’m going to generalize here, but most ports are skid-loaded from one system to the next, with nominal, mostly control-related differences. The best you can say is that the other half (or third, or fourth, or fifth) gets some exposure — assuming the game’s worth playing.
Not so with Diablo III for consoles, which does seem to be worth playing, while putting appreciable distance between it and the over one-year-old PC version: A bona fide offline mode? Yep. Four-player local co-op LAN support? Incredible. No auction house? For real. No real money auction house? Stranger than fiction. A special “Yo, wussup God of War!” evade left-right-back-forward move mapped to the right thumbstick? Crazy like a fox, is Blizzard.
Here’s a sampling of the accolades:
“Despite compromises that were made to cram the mouse-and-keyboard game onto a console, it’s a faithful and entertaining recreation of the essence of the game,” writes Xav de Matos for Joystiq. “If anything, it’s closer to what I had hoped for when Diablo 3 launched last year.”
“…it’s actually better than its PC counterpart,” writes EGM‘s Josh Harmon, going there. “That may well sound like heresy to any folks out there who’ve already made plans to be buried with their keyboard, mouse, and mint, in-box copy of Lord of Destruction, but it’s plainly hard to argue otherwise.”
Or consider Eurogamer’s Oli Welsh, who notes, “About the only thing you can’t do to console Diablo 3 is mod it,” and writes: “Diablo 3 on console is one of the best co-op games money can buy. It swings smoothly from easygoing to intense, with perfectly paced pockets of downtime, and is capable of swallowing entire evenings in a single, voracious gulp.”
You can find your way to the rest if you like, or — and this, I recommend — you can enjoy a slightly different look that’s five installments along (with more coming this week) courtesy Quarter to Three, as site editor Tom Chick and Brandon Cackowski-Schnell throw down in someone’s living room, delving into…well, definitely delving. If you want to think about Diablo III for consoles in ways you probably haven’t (and no one else is), you’ll want to follow along by monitoring the site’s Diablo III tag, starting with the inaugural entry, “Diablo III in the Living Room: a tale of two Diablo players.”