Diablo III review: highly addictive, if unambitious, action RPG sequel

November 2024 Update: A lot has changed since the last time we looked at Diablo III (you can read our review below). The game still runs on Macs, but the transition to Apple Silicon has meant that it relies on Rosetta to run on modern Macs, and umpteen new versions of the macOS have introduced a few bugs that are annoying even if they don’t completely break the game.

Now, completely out of the blue, the developers at Blizzard have brought Diablo III right up to date for Mac users with version 2.7.8. Now, as well as being compatible with the most recent versions of the macOS and ironing out those old bugs, Diablo III now runs natively on Macs with either Intel processors or Apple Silicon – and that’s quite surprising for a game that’s this old. 

Read our review from 2012 and our 2024 update which includes the latest additions to the game.

Diablo III review

Twenty years after the events of the last game, a meteor strikes the much-troubled town of Tristram, opening up a gateway into the depths of the earth and paving the way for the return of the demon lord Diablo. As always, it’s up to you to gird your loins and turn back the forces of darkness before they unleash untold nastiness upon the earth.

This time around you can choose from five different character classes – barbarian, demon hunter, monk, witch doctor and wizard – each with its own unique skills and abilities. The graphics have been updated too, and now provide a true 3D view of the action. However, Blizzard seems to have made a conscious decision to stick to the dark, cramped corridors and simplistic graphical style of the earlier Diablo games, and I did find myself longing for the bright, epic landscapes of recent role-playing games such as the Dragon Age series and Skyrim.

Another thing that hasn’t changed much is the sheer finger-clicking addictiveness of the Diablo formula. The moment you arrive in Tristram you find yourself confronted by a horde of shambling zombies who promptly proceed to poop little piles of gold on the floor after you’ve pummelled them into submission. Unencumbered by much in the way of plot or supporting characters, Diablo III simply throws monsters and magical loot at you until your fingers bleed and your mouse bursts into flames.

Once you’ve completed the main single-player game on ‘normal’ level you can go back and play it at the harder ‘nightmare’ and ‘hell’ difficulty levels. That should keep you busy for a few months and, as with Diablo II, you also have the option of joining multiplayer ‘public’ games using Blizzard’s Battle.Net service.

This is one area where Diablo III does differ from its predecessors. Public games in Diablo II often tended to degenerate into a free-for-all, but Diablo III puts more emphasis on cooperative play in order to complete quests and kill the big boss monsters. Hopefully this will ensure that multiplayer games are more rewarding both in terms of fun and the loot that you gain.

And that brings us to what is perhaps Diablo III’s most controversial feature – the online Auction House. At the moment, the Auction House here in the UK allows you to trade items with other players using the gold coins that you earn within the game itself. That will certainly prove to be a popular addition – as it already has in the massively multiplayer World Of Warcraft. But within the next few weeks Blizzard is also planning to open a second Auction House that lets you use real-world cash to buy items – with, of course, Blizzard taking a cut of the proceeds. I’m old-fashioned enough to think that this is a horrible idea for all sorts of reasons, but at least Blizzard has included parental controls to prevent young children from using Dad’s credit card to buy a Sword Of Awesome Pointiness +3.

Diablo III 2024, 2.7.8 update for Macs

The 2.7.8 update arrives at the same time as Season 33 of Diablo III, and it’s worth noting that there have been quite a few changes to the content of the game in recent years. Blizzard no longer produces any new content for the game, and Season 30 last year was the last ‘new’ season that had its own theme and challenges. However, Blizzard is now recycling themes from previous seasons, with the current Season 33 revisiting the Shades Of The Nephilim theme, which allows you to summon clone versions of your character to help you in battle.

And while Season 30 was the end of the road for new game content, Blizzard did introduce a number of new features that should help to keep diehard players interested – especially for people like me who prefer to play solo most of the time. The new Solo Self Found mode (SSF) is a completely single-player mode that doesn’t allow you to team up with other players at all, forcing you to rely purely on weapons and items that you find on your own. Of course, playing solo can mean that it takes longer to find the gear that you need, so Blizzard introduced another new feature called Visions Of Enmity, which opens portals to a series of mini-levels that are crammed full of monsters, but which also provide a big, fat chest full of loot once you reach the final level. And, back in your home town of New Tristam, you’ll find the Altar Of Rites, where you can sacrifice some of your hard-earned loot to gain a series of bonuses and buffs that will help you tackle the game’s many challenges in solo mode. 

Of course, the giant elephant in the dungeon is the fact that Diablo IV, which was launched just last year, isn’t available for the Mac at all, but at least this revamp of Diablo III provides plenty of dungeon-crawling fun for Mac users. And, of course, there are options that may allow you to run Diablo IV as well, if you read our guide to the best virtual machine software for Macs.