This is a spoiler-free review of the latest greatest addition, following 2012's Diablo 3, but a Diablo game's story is sort of unspoilable, both because a) paying attention to it is of passing importance to playing, and b) the plot of them is always basically the same anyway. For the uninitiated, Diablo forms one of the jewels in Blizzard's crown (maybe a smaller one, just offset to the Warcraft centre stone), an action- RPG series that's like if the kind of 90s metal album cover that has a skeleton on it asked to be turned into a game where you explode many hundreds of near-identical monsters to get incrementally better loot.

Playing Diablo 4 gave me a real case of the 'Have I changed, or have the games changed?', and I think the answer is 'yes'.

Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-8600K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 1070, Windows 10.Developer: Blizzard Team 3, Blizzard Albany.

Diablo IV is a beautiful, frictionless grey toybox that puts nothing in the way of you playing it for hours and wondering what you've done with your life.

Diablo 4 2018