I get huge mixed feelings while playing Diablo Immortal. On the one hand, the core of the game is really good – I’d even go as far as to say it’s borderline great. All the stuff I love about Diablo is here: the fountains of loot, the showpiece bosses, the waves of enemies designed to make you feel powerful as you rip them apart. And it’s not stingy with this stuff either. Diablo 3 was turgid at the beginning but Immortal throws everything at you from the moment you begin – boss encounters, set pieces, big stuff. And it all makes for a hell of an introduction. It genuinely feels like Diablo at its best.
The game feels natural in your hands on a phone, too (I’m using a Pixel 6). It loads quickly (for me) and plays smoothly, and the virtual joystick on the left tracks my thumb around the screen fairly reliably, and I can fire off abilities with my other thumb, on the other side of the screen, fairly reliably too. There are occasional snags, though. Sometimes the joystick doesn’t pick up my thumb movement, leaving me standing still, which is not great in the middle of battle and has made me shout out in anger a few times. And sometimes the abilities, which are on the other side of the screen, flip direction when I’m trying to deploy them, leaving me to manually, awkwardly, realign them. But most of the time you can pretty much play Diablo, as hectic as it can be, just fine on your phone.
(Incidentally, you can also play it on PC, in a beta version of Immortal accessed via Battle.net. Don’t get carried away: it’s a pretty straight port of the mobile game, it’s not a bespoke desktop version of it, so the resolution is low and some of touch controls feel out of place as you simulate them with the mouse cursor. But it does control better in combat, and it’s a nice touch being able to play on both platforms and carry your progress across.)
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