Diablo III, Act 1 (Normal Difficulty)

So far the game's pretty boring. You begin with access to so few skills that there's almost no depth to the combat -- click on the enemy until they die, maybe run a way a little and drink a health potion, and press the skills buttons sometimes. In Act 1 on Normal difficulty, Diablo 3 is gaming for babies.

Because Blizzard (obviously) wanted its players to train their way, slowly and effectively, through their characters' skills (and thus not have access to most skills until after many hours of play) the enemies are really easy (hence "'Normal' Difficulty"). My brain tells me the game might start being fun once Nightmare difficulty rolls in, which is about 12 hours of mostly depthless, challengeless gameplay from now. Bleegh.

But! So far the experience isn't intolerable. Seeing all the spiffy-looking effects and new features and environments and people, and being more and more impressed by how well designed the interface is, keeps me headed towards the finish. Or maybe that's just my wanting to write a review of the entire hack-n-slash, action RPG genre.

Speaking of writing! The game's writing is trite! Luckily my Spanish isn't strong enough to comprehend the triteness. (i.e. I'm playing the Spanish version of the game; it's called Diablo for a reason)

The other annoyance is that the game currently has a tendency to be in "emergency server maintenance" and thus be unplayable. I have to wait so long to be bored! For details read Tom Chick's beginner's guide to Diablo III.