Heaven can wait – I need ten more minutes in hell! PETER HOSKIN reviews DIABLO IV 

Diablo IV (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £69.99)

Verdict: Addictive as hell

Judgement:

Can I please fight the denizens of hell for another ten minutes? I promise I’ll go straight to bed afterwards!

Sorry, don’t know what happened to me there. Or rather, I do – because I’ve spent practically every minute of the week playing Diablo IV for the past few weeks, and it took me right back to my teenage dependence on the original Diablo.

If a more compulsive game is released this year, my marriage will be in trouble.

In many ways, this new Diablo is very similar to its predecessors. A moody demonic lady in a plunging dress has risen to flood the fantasy world of Sanctuary with… yadda yadda yadda.

As the chosen hero of this realm, you still have to frantically click, click and click your mouse to defeat waves of hoof monsters.

But Diablo IV is also the perfection of form. Sanctuary itself is beautiful, a series of colorful diorama-like landscapes and dungeons.

The options for customizing your character are excitingly extensive. The story is great, schlocky fun.

Even all that clicking seems somehow… fine-tuned, like it’s designed to stimulate certain nerve endings.

There’s just one nagging question: is Diablo IV too perfect? Maybe.

It’s so simple, mindless enjoyment that it feels like the empty calorie equivalent of gaming; really really good junk food, but still junk food.

The inclusion of both an elaborate endgame – new challenges for once you’ve completed the main story – and a shop to spend real money on digital costumes only adds to this feeling.

You’re trapped here with these hell beasts.

Or are they locked up here with me? Anyway, I’m not leaving. Ten more minutes, please.

System Shock (PC, £34.99)

Verdict: Shockingly good

Judgement:

Back in 1994, when the original System Shock was released, they speculated about a future where unregulated artificial intelligences would gain more and more power until they decided to take on humanity themselves. Computers run amok.

It can’t happen in real life, can it? No. Not possible. We’re fine.

What happened instead, in this year 2023, is a System Shock remake.

We’re back aboard the Citadel space station taking on the rogue AI known as SHODAN and she – her? – assortment of traps and tragically mutated humans.

Except this time around the graphics are nicer and the gameplay more in tune with today’s sensibilities.

It’s those graphics that initially stand out.

Here, luckily, prettier doesn’t simply mean more photorealistic: the developers behind this remake, Nightdive Studios, have gone for a half-and-half mix of modern gloss and pixelation from the mid-1990s. It’s inventive, colorful – and very eye-catching.

But it’s the gameplay that really draws you in.

The changes made to the original’s mechanics – especially when it comes to the combat, which was always a little clunky – are all improvements, but they’re not too extensive.

Nightdive clearly understands that the core experience of 1994’s System Shock, sneaking around a creepy space station and devising ways to progress, was already big enough.

This game influenced so many others from Deus Ex to the BioShock series for a reason.

In a sense, it is the influence of System Shock that limits this recurrence. It’s hard to play it without hankering after similar remakes of the other even better games that came after the original – including one of the all-time greats, 1999’s System Shock 2.

Fortunately, Nightdive is working on that too, so it’s only a matter of time.

Unless, of course, the AIs get to all of us before then.