When my health and mana are in the red and I need to snap-turn to quickly freeze a horde of lads that look like the freaking Beast Titan, the last thing I want my sorceress to do is swing a full U-turn like a forklift in an armored skirt. In a similar vein, the walking animations feel a little slow and forced, particularly when you're trying to turn around. As much as I've tried to get used to it, I just don't like the stamina bar sprinting indefinitely is one part of Diablo 3 I think I'll always miss.

I'm willing to attribute a few long load times and occasional performance dips to alpha weirdness, but some bugbears are baked in. Because Diablo 2 was made before they became the norm, its world unfolds with a more authentic sense of mystery and discovery, which is one of the cooler ways that its age works to its favor. It really is hilarious how trained I am to automatically look for an arrow or diamond or some other symbol that says 'go here, stupid.' Quest markers are like subtitles but more intrusive – distracting but useful, and often necessary as a guide. This challenges you to – horror of horrors – actually read dialogue and talk to NPCs. You have a handy little journal, but you don't have the clear quest markers that a lot of today's games hand you – either automatically, or after a short period if the game determines that you're lost.

Like a lot of older games, Diablo 2 is also more hands-off with its main quest. Between that and the more meticulous inventory management, there's an almost survival horror funk going on, which I'm here for. In fact, I rather enjoyed the focus on potions and resource management. I know Diablo 2 by reputation and I have some idea of what end-game builds are capable of, so I'm not worried about mana constraints in the long-run. You have fewer abilities available to you and they're tied to two weapons that can be swapped on command, but the flow of combat is largely unchanged, with the notable exception that mana is a lot harder to come by in the early stages of the game. It took me about an hour to shake off my Diablo 3 muscle memory, but once I did, I felt right at home liquefying demons in Diablo 2.

More surprising was how good it felt to play. Blizzard has (mostly) done a good job remastering things in the past, and Diablo 2: Resurrected always looked good from a distance.

Never played diablo before diablo 4