Diablo has finally risen from his centuries-long imprisonment, and we should be celebrating.

Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo is a dungeon- crawling game of the new computer age. It is an incredible mix of art, music, and solid gameplay all rolled into one remarkable gaming experience. It feels like a completely new kind of game, but you will recognize a few familiar elements.

The entire game is about your character's fight against the Lord of Terror, one of the seven Great Evils. Everything is set against the backdrop of the struggle between the forces of the Heaven and Hell in an eternal battle called "The Sin War." In the case of the people of Tristram, their political and spiritual leaders were influenced by Diablo, and now strive to open his way into the upper world. You must defeat Diablo by braving the perils of the very Labyrinth created to imprison him.

Diablo is played from an isometric viewpoint with 3d pre-rendered characters. Using techniques similar to those Blizzard used in Warcraft 2, each creature is as finely detailed as the miniature figurines gamers are familiar with.

The game walks a fine line between hack-and-slash and RPG. One one hand, most fighting is accomplished with a furious pounding of the mouse button on your intended target. On the other, you have a manageable inventory, experience levels, character classes, stats, and a very wide variety of magical and mundane equipment that can be gained through trade or combat.

There are three characters to choose from, Warrior, Rogue, and Sorceror, who have expertise in hand weapons, ranged weapons, and spells, respectively. Unlike the games previously mentioned, characters have CRPG-style stats such as Strength, Dexterity, Magic, Vitality, etc. While these start as presets early on in the game, experience and magic will alter them, giving the player some control over how his or her character will evolve.

Diablo's interface is carefully considered. The main menus follow the tradition of the first-person shooting games - simple, but effective. The in-game interface is where things really come together. The first thing you will notice are a red and blue sphere, representing your life and mana forces, respectively. Your character also wears a belt with eight numbered slots. Potions and scrolls can be kept ready in these slots, and activated with a single keystroke. If your armor or weapon is damaged severly, overlay icons will appear in the corner of the screen to notify you. All of your spells and scrolls can be displayed in a "quick" menu or a detailed menu to choose from, and readied into a "speedbook" slot that will activate the readied spell with a right mouse button press, leaving the left for your weapon. All of these allow you to play while one or more of them are open.

Naturally the side effect is that you can't get away with many of the tricks players are accustomed to from older CRPGs. Since battle happens quickly, you can't easily change weapons or spells in the middle of a fight. The result is that you have to plan ahead and make do with whatever you have readied. It also stresses that playing "inventory management" in the middle of an uncleared dungeon is not a very wise idea. This lends much more "realism" to the game and insures that the play never really stops.

You're not the only hero in the game. The enemy hordes occasionally have anti-heroes with have the ability to rally the troops (making them fight more effectively as a unit). They're always bad news, but they carry valuable items. It adds some character to the otherwise faceless masses.

One of the more interesting features of Diablo is the level design. Each time you enter a new level that you haven't been to before, it generates the level randomly. You would think that such a design would guarantee total chaos in the layout of each level, but they all seem pretty well done. In fact, you can easily forget the levels are random. Magic items are random as well.

There are many different effects and abilities that various items may have. To break the style up a little, occasional artifacts are included. These artifacts possess unique, unusual, and sometimes chaotic abilities that can have a tremendous effect on game play. Even the quests are randomly assigned. A hero might receive a number of quests over time, but they're not always the same. There is a list of different quests you can be assigned to, but you won't exhaust it all in only one time through. All of this contributes to enough variety to allow playing through the game several times without being too repetitive.

The dungeons you walk in are very dark, and your character can see for only a few paces in most areas. However, the way that lighting is implemented in Diablo, you'll frequently see things scurrying about at the edge of your vision. You can see just enough to suddenly stop everything and brace yourself for battle, but rarely enough to be able to tell what it was you actually saw! This is a great change from the typical game where you either see something or not - spotting enemies now comes in various degrees. The horrifying part is when you see something moving in the dark, and it suddenly emerges into the light as a deadly horde! The transition from "What is that?" to "Run awaaaay!!" becomes very interesting, to say the least.

The music deserves special recognition. In keeping with its Gothic atmosphere, its composition and instrument selection are masterful. In town, an acoustic guitar and an occasional horn played with a somber note keeps the pace. In the Labyrinth itself, one hears a spectral chorus backed up by a fusillade of booming tympanis. The music holds constant for a certain number of levels before changing, but thoughtful design doesn't make its repetition tiresome.

With a dungeon-crawl game like Diablo, you would expect it to be set in a very Tolkienesque universe, complete with the stereotypical characters, situations, and so on. Instead Diablo has a very powerful Gothic atmosphere.

There are a number of religious references about. The Labyrinth is very dark and foreboding, with crypts and detrius strewn about inside. In many places the walls are crumbling, or blood and entrails may be seen strewn about. Even the colors of the game are muted and sickly. The manual itself is chock full of exquisite artwork in the Games Workshop style.

Prices are high for premium items at the shops, so players frequently will save up for several dungeon trips to try to get the necessary money to afford them. It's a nice change from most other RPGs,where the characters have enough money to buy almost anything they want. In Diablo, you'll probably be able to buy all the basics you need, and just a few premium items, so you'll actually have to choose carefully.

The game has excellent multiplayer support. Everything from serial connections to LAN and internet-play is supported. Blizzard has set up a free server on the internet called Battle-net. Up to four players can play at a time over the net - and their system is probably the easiest internet play system ever developed, making it simple to get some friends together for a night of Diablo gaming. Battle-net has had some gestation problems; however, Blizzard is hard at work on this, so many of the glitches should be dealt with by the time you read this.

Diablo has some limitations. There really aren't quite as many levels as you would expect. The game claims to have hundreds of monsters. In reality, there are perhaps a couple dozen different enemies, but they change the colors on the monsters and tweak the AI a bit to reduce the memory constraints. Similar with the characters. Each character class has different animations for using armor or different classes of weapons, but not for different types. Each different level has only a few different kind of monsters you might see - again due to memory limits for storing so many different frames of animation each. Overall, these are just little details, but it would be nice to see more variety in a sequel.

Diablo's pacing is unbelievably well done. There's always the promise of a better piece of equipment, or spell book, or magic item, or interesting new monster just around the corner. Each new tease ties into the next so seamlessly that you will easily find yourself playing until the very latest hours of the night, and even then you'll have to tear yourself away.

The game runs in Windows 95 or NT4 - and it does so beautifully. You can switch out and back on the fly without disrupting the game at all. The only thing I would have like to see that it lacks is a windowed play mode. Be careful that you do not have any programs in your computer that pop-up with alerts in the background. Otherwise you may find the computer switching back to your operating system to tell you something, while in the game your poor character is getting the stuffing beat out of him/her.

All in all, Diablo is an elegant modern interpretation of a dungeon crawl. Blizzard deserves considerable commendation on not only releasing such a polished product, but also having the will to hold the game back from release until it is truly done (passing up even the traditionally lucrative Christmas season release to insure that it was ready). Anyone who likes the idea of a simple, addicting CRPG with great play value better stock up on chips and soda: it's going to be another late night with Diablo.

Diablo junkies and junkies-in-training take note: Some of us Shadis folks are often on Battle.net - look for a game named "shadis," with password "shadis." See you in the dungeon.

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