Diablo 4 has been a long time coming, as Blizzard has tried to right past wrongs by taking its sweet time and making sure it’s fully ready before bringing it to the masses.

As part of that slow-boil process, we’ve just had the first of two weekends of early access for pre-orderers and series fans – and we’ve played through Act 1 of what looks like it’ll be a seriously chunky game. Here are our thoughts so far.

Back to Sanctuary

Diablo’s story can be about as simple or as complicated as you like – depending on your inclination, it’s either a sprawling tale of human greed and demonic insurrection or a skip-the-dialogue shortcut with very, very cool cutscenes.

The good news is that if you’re not up to date on which demonic princes and powers have been vanquished in games gone by and which are still very much out there, even if potentially trapped in soulstones, Diablo 4 doesn’t require any foreknowledge.

It quickly establishes, through an unbelievably gorgeous opening cinematic, that there’s a new baddie in the world of Sanctuary – Lilith, daughter of Mephisto and an all-around bad egg.

She’s come back thanks to a pesky ritual and is here to do absolutely no good whatsoever, so it’s up to your player character to stop her, with the help of an assortment of variously doomed side characters.

The open beta lets you play through the game’s first act and explore its first major area, a sizeable slice of content that has you meeting a few principal cast members and working out just what Lilith is up to.

On the technical side, this storytelling is much-improved thanks to a higher frequency of in-engine cutscenes that mostly look great, with your character’s custom looks and armour all present and correct, and a decent range of emotion on show.

Blizzard’s pre-rendered cinematics are second to none but cannot bring that immersive touch, so it’s nice to play through Diablo 4’s early hours while seeing and hearing so much from our character.

Technicalities

It’s the technical side of things that really feels like a leap forward for Diablo 4, in fact, even if some of the trappings of the game will feel super familiar to those who sunk hours into Diablo 3.

First, an impossible-to-ignore factor is that the game is always-online, requiring a persistent connection to function properly and this brings with it some significant drawbacks.

Having instability in a beta period is completely fair enough and, while for most of the weekend we had no queues to worry about, there were times when we were told to wait an hour to get from the main menu into the game.

Ending your game session, meanwhile, is now an imprecise matter – you’ll quit the game without being able to create a manual save, and when you turn it back on it’s a bit of a lucky dip as to where you’ll be loaded in and with what degree of repeated progress required.

Each time it happens there’s no denying the annoyance it causes, and it did leave us longing for a proper offline mode that would let us plug away in peace.

However, online persistence means that the world feels alive in a way that had us basically feeling a bit like we were on a small World of Warcraft server at times, with other players buzzing around and in-world events to take part in together for better rewards.

It also means that co-op is easier than ever and so simple to swing into action with, while same-screen action is also accounted for handily.

These two concepts, that of the offline dungeon-crawler and the online community, are struggling to coexist and it’s clear that Blizzard is leaning toward the latter, but we’ll have to see how things hold up at launch to really judge how well the balance is struck.

Hack and slash

If those technical annoyances sound troublemaking, it’s important to add the context that they didn’t stop us from sinking basically 12 hours into Diablo 4 in the space of two days.

So, for those worried, this is Diablo back near the peak of its powers in our opinion, with loads of friction sanded away to make the experience buttery smooth.

Hack-and-slash combat is rarely this satisfying, with cooldowns to juggle and synergies just waiting to be discovered.

A redesigned skill tree is simple to navigate and easy to reassign for new builds and experiments, and with multiple classes to discover there is a wealth of mechanics to get your head around.

Mobs of enemies are plentiful and generally easy to mulch through, but you can easily up the difficulty of your entire realm if you want a stiffer challenge and greater rewards.

With just a single area to get through, albeit a big one, there isn’t a wild degree of enemy variety here, but we were also consciously discovering every area and going a bit completionist due to the level cap of 25 and the end of the included story content, so that’s no fault of Blizzard’s at this stage.

We’re huge fans of how easy some things have been made, too. A new emote wheel includes the ability to teleport out of a dungeon at any time, while nipping to town and back into the depths for a quick run to the blacksmith or merchant has never been easier.

It has us remembering the challenges of hoarding town portal scrolls in years gone by and praising the gods that we no longer have to worry.

The addiction factor is back and couldn’t be more powerful, too. Loot fountains are as compelling as ever, the powers and variables they offer as beguiling as possible.

You can now change your armour’s looks without any limits whatsoever, too, so long as you’ve salvaged one piece to get the design into your wardrobe, which makes fashion more malleable than ever – something that will surely fuel some grinding once the full game releases.

A dark place

We played Diablo 4 on a PlayStation 5 and it was graphically nice and impressive. We suspect that the full release will have a wider range of graphical settings to be tweaked but they’re not exactly desperately needed.

This is a good-looking game that might not necessarily blow you away with its fidelity but won us over thanks to its attention to detail.

The world of Sanctuary is once again as dark and brooding as players demanded back during Diablo 3’s reveal, and its winding mines and blood-spattered ruins are impressively grim.

Dungeons feel rewarding to explore but the thing that really ties the whole world together is how reactive it is – every bit of set-dressing can be broken apart and scattered, sometimes for a small pile of loot but more often for the sheer fun of it.

This ensures that rooms are left in chaos after a fight, and the sound design that accompanies each reaction is so satisfying, from crunches to wood clatters to chests opening.

Playing as a sorcerer, our spells were rewardingly kinetic and sparkly, and when the screen filled with enemies we didn’t notice any slowdown in the frame count.

This was thrown way off anytime we brought up the PlayStation’s UI or quick menu, though, to adjust our headset’s volume or join a party, for example. That would bring the game in the background to a stuttering slideshow while the audio stayed accurate, which made for a weird experience. A true pause button wouldn’t go amiss but feels unlikely to be present at launch.

The default camera position also feels a little close at times, making it slightly hard to manage fighting from range or bigger mobs, but that’s something we again suspect will be tweakable once the full version hits stores.

First impressions

With a handful of months left before launch, we’re hugely excited about how Diablo 4 is shaping up – we can see this beta easily persuading more people to get the full game.

Every ingredient is here for those looking to become cripplingly addicted to Blizzard’s loot-hunting formula once more, but it’s the polish to its storytelling and the wild attention to detail in its environments that really hooked us.

Online integration once again has some downsides, but if you want to play in a party then there might not be a better game come June.