Diablo 3 is a good game to relax to. It’s accessible—especially on console—it’s satisfying, and it’s not too demanding. At least, when you don’t know how to change the difficulty.

You see, I knew what I wanted from Diablo 3. A character with a lot of pets/minions so I could watch my autonomous army do my dirty work. The Witch Doctor is an excellently implemented version of this archetype, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself granted useful skills to take an active role with as well. It was never necessary until late on though…

I mentioned the difficulty level, which is an example of how my experience was affected by the user-unfriendly menus. Within the game itself they all work quite well for what was designed as a click-em-up and converted to console, but outside of that I hit some stumbling blocks. The game didn’t bother to explain to me quite what a “Season” was—it’s a timed system that is designed to keep experienced players looped back in and presumably never stop playing. But there seemed to be no downside for a new player to join in. Then I decided the game was not challenging me at all, and tried to switch to a harder mode. Normally this would be possible, but I was stopped as the game informed me that Seasonal players cannot change difficulty mid-game. Now I figured out many hours later that I could actually change it, but only before loading my character. You see how this is confusing, I hope.

So what I can say is that the game is great fun, well designed, and with a no doubt intricately researched and highly refined gameplay loop tuned for engagement. But the metagame aspects, anything in the post-story modes, is a huge twisting mess of tiered content, loot, and grinding. There’s something of a wall between them; I dabbled after completing the plot but escaped with my free time intact, for now. No judgement on those who continue to play the game of course, but my own preference is to move on.

Anyway I enjoyed playing through the story here. Many of the locations and setpieces seemed like retreads of bits from Diablo 2, but I liked how the different characters were involved in it. Despite me usually using this as a podcast game, I liked having characters follow me around, chattering to me to flesh out their personalities (especially the mercs/hirelings who are now friends with their own sidestories) or audio logs doing worldbuilding on the side. There’s also fun twists as you go along to keep you invested, and the occasional impeccable Blizzard CGI cutscene. But the game’s really about running around slaying multitudes of mooks, liberating loot, and sometimes pausing to compare some numbers and pick the higher ones. And that it does pretty well.