It doesn’t completely alleviate the sting of having to start the game fresh (you can’t import progress or cross-play with other versions of the game), but it helps.Įven after all these years, I still find Diablo III’s loop of starting small and becoming a godlike force of destruction irresistible.

I’d still recommend that new players roll through the story, since it introduces some of the basic systems in an easy-to-digest format, but if you’ve done it before there’s no reason to slay Diablo and his cronies yet again. Adventure mode is where the “real” game is, filled with challenges that are designed to be beaten and replayed, such as clearing out enemies in rifts or running through short bounty quests. One of the most welcome things about this port is that new players can dive right into the adventure mode without having to complete the campaign first. Inventory management can be a pain, especially when you’re trying to sort through and compare large quantities of gear, but those are legacy nitpicks that have been around since the game originally came to console. The text is small – particularly if you’re looking at the Switch’s screen – but I didn’t run into any problems with legibility. I preferred using a Pro controller, but the default Joy-Cons do a serviceable job in a pinch. In the actual game, however, it looks great. The only real graphical compromise that stood out was how some details washed out in the zoomed-in character screens.

It remained rock solid in four-person local co-op, too, even as we filled the screen with my necromancer’s herd of skeletons, a witch doctor’s army, and a crusader’s barrage of spectral hammers. The game runs beautifully on the hardware, whether portable or docked, and I didn’t experience any distracting slowdown or graphical hitches during my playtime.

Diablo 3 on nintendo switch review