I have played this game....a lot.  As of the writing of this review I have played my wizard for 127.5 hours and my barbarian for 204 hours.  I know a lot about the game and will try to condense it as much as possible.

The Core Concept

I wanted to explain the core concept of Diablo first, it's different than a lot of games and it can be hard to explain.  I would guess that many people have many different goals in Diablo, but I think the core concept of Diablo III is killing monsters to get gear so you can kill more monsters and get more gear.  It's pretty simple, and may seem quite boring with just that simple explanation.  There are many things that go in to this, and I will now discuss them each at length.

Basic Gameplay

So, how do you kill monsters and get loot?  You start as one of five classes: barbarian, monk, demon hunter, wizard, or witch doctor (more info on those later).  You can pick male or female, and other than that there is no customization on the look of your character, though each character/gender has its own voice acting for various observations they make throughout the game.  You can get a slightly different story from each of the characters, which I suppose would add some replayability.

You start the game with only a basic attack skill and one other skill depending on your class.  As you level up you gain more skills, and soon you will start gaining runes (variations on skills you already have, more later).  You gain something each level, so it is always nice to level up.

Using the default setup your left mouse button is always your primary attack, and your right mouse button would be a special attack.  Numbers 1-4 are assigned, one each, to the other four schools of spells/skills you get depending on your class.  Q is to use a potion. Potions now have a 30 second cooldown so you can just chain potion to heal yourself. Monsters now have a chance at dropping health globes, which restore health when gathered.

There is an option in the options menu called Elective Mode, this will allow you to assign any skills from any school to any of the keys.  So, you could use two different primary attacks, two offensive abilities, and one special move if you wanted to.  I HIGHLY suggest using this mode as it is much more versatile than the default mode.

So, what about the loot?  There are breakable objects, chests, and of course monsters to kill, and they all drop loot!  There are also packs of special monsters called champion packs.  Later in the game this is where the bulk of your loot will come from.  A champion pack is a group of 3-4 monsters (depending on the pack type).  They can be any normal monster, but instead they will have blue names (or yellow if it's a rare pack).  They will have more hit points than the standard monster of that type, and in normal difficulty they will have one "Affix". 

An Affix is a special ability that only champion packs get, it makes them more difficult, but they also drop the best loot!  There are Affixes that are bad for close range characters, some bad for long range, and some bad for both.  One of the worst ones for close range characters is fire chains, this ability puts a chain of, you guessed it, fire between each of the monsters in the pack that deals damage to anyone in the chain.  The monsters will do their best to put you in the chains too!  One of the worst one for ranged is mortar, this lobs a ball of fire at ranged characters.  An example of one that is bad for everyone and is kind of basic would be extra health, in which monsters simply get...extra health.

The affixes monsters get are totally random, if you are ranged you have as much chance as getting a fire chains (no threat to ranged) as you do of getting a mortar (big threat to ranged).

There are several qualities of loot you can get:  Common (white, worthless except very early game), Magical (blue), Rare (yellow), Legendary (orange/redish), and Set (green).  Every monster in the game has a chance to drop the best item in the game (that is level appropriate).  There are several ways to increase your loot drops, the first way to get items that have Magic Find on them.  This will up your chance at getting a Magical or higher item.  The second is at level 60, and is called Nephalem Valor (more on that later).

Difficulty

This is where Diablo III differs from a lot of games.  Most games I would play once on normal, and never play again.  Diablo III is built to be played over and over....and over.  To this end there are four difficulties.

The first is "Normal".  Normal difficulty should take you to about level 30, at which point you will have every skill in the game.  There are still runes to unlock though, so don't worry!  When you beat normal you unlock Nightmare.  Nightmare is more difficult, but better loot drops.

In Nightmare champion packs get two affixes, and they can be any combo.  Also, new affixes become available in harder difficulties that are even more challenging.  Nightmare will take you to about level 50.  Next comes "Hell" difficulty.  Monsters get harder again, and again drop better loot.  In hell difficulty champoin packs get three affixes, which again are completely random.  I believe this is when the "Reflect Damage" affix is introduced, it is a nightmare for ranged.  Basically ranged has very little damage reduction and does very high damage, so you can easily kill yourself with the damage that gets reflected back as you try to kill the pack.

When you defeat the final boss on hell, you unlock Inferno.  Inferno is only playable by level 60 characters and is very difficult.  Champion packs now have four affixes.  A new game mechanic is introduced in inferno, called Nephalem Valor.

Nephalem Valor does not exist until level 60.  At level 60 you will start to gain a bonus for each champion pack you kill (up to five times).  When you get five stacks of the bonus you will get a guaranteed rare (yellow) item from each pack as well as a bonus to your gold find and magic find.  When you kill a boss with five stacks of the bonus you get a guaranteed two rares.  It's a very nice bonus for item hunting.

The Classes

There are basically two types of characters. ranged and melee.  The witch doctor, wizard and demon hunter are ranged, while the monk and barbarian are melee.  As a general rule ranged characters in Diablo III are very much "glass cannons", meaning they do very high damage but can't take much in return.  Most of the ranged characters rely on something called "Kiting".  Basically what that means is that you keep the monsters at ranged (so they can't hit you) while running and casting spells at the same time.  Melee characters generally have to be much more defense oriented, as they need to take many hits.

I will now explain a little about each class.  I'll start with the wizard, since that was my first character.

The wizard is a ranged character with very high damage.  The basic idea for a wizard is that he has two kind of damaging spells.  One school of spells uses none of their resource, which is arcane power, while the other is arcane power heavy.  Both schools have very good spells.  The wizard regains his lost arcane power very quickly, though even with the fast regeneration it is required to always have one of the no cost spells.

The barbarian's resource is called fury.  You gain fury by using fury gaining abilities, like cleave or frenzy, and use fury by using fury spenders, like hammer of the ancients.  That's the basic idea, though on inferno difficulty I don't use a fury spender (remember elective mode, you can do that).  Fury decays over time when not in combat, you also gain fury for hitting any destructible objects in the game.  The barbarian has a shout, which gives everyone in the party more armor (and other stats depending on the rune...which I still haven't gotten to!).

The monk has spirit.  You gain spirit in much the same way as a barbarian, however spirit does not decay over time and you do not get spirit from breaking objects.  The monk also has a small heal which is vital to his survival.  The monk has auras, one of them gives the party more dodge

The witch doctor has summoned pets that do his bidding, but unfortunately they are largely worthless in inferno because monsters kill them with one hit.  Witch doctors have mana, and it runs out very fast.  They have mana spending abilities, as well as abilities that take very little mana (almost like the wizard).  The witch doctor has many forms of crowd control (the ability to make monsters unable to act) as well as a high damage.

The demon hunter has two resources, discipline, and hatred.  In general, discipline is used for his defensive abilities, and hatred for damage dealing abilities.  Discipline regenerates over time, while hatred is gained by using hatred generating skills.

Character Customization

Earlier I mentioned the only customization to your character was class and gender...that's sort of true.  There are no face builders or anything like that.  However, there are armor dyes, and many people will use different skills..and runes!

So, runes.  Runes are variations on abilities that you already have.  Here's an example from the wizard.  Electrocute is one of his primary abilities early on and it shoots an arc of lighting that chains to (I think) three monsters.  There are runes to make it do less damage, but chain to more monsters.  There is a rune that makes it regenerate your arcane power for each monster it hits.  There is a rune the changes it completely to be a small cone attack (meaning it does a cone of lighting in front of your character instead of chaining around).  Every skill in the game has runes, and they are all unlocked by simply leveling up.  Some of the best runes are low level though.

Armor is kind of odd.  There are what are called tiers of armor.  Every helm in tier one looks the same on a barbarian, but that same helm can be worn on a wizard and then it would look like a wizard's helm.  Any armor can be worn by anyone (though certain classes prefer certain stats).  There are many tiers (looks) of armor throughout the game.

The Auction Houses

Diablo III has two different built in auction houses, that you can access from the game's main menu area.  The first is the gold auction house.

The gold auction house allows you to sell any item in game for the in game currency of gold.  Let's say you play a wizard, and some really high strength boots drop.  Well, you don't need strength, so you can sell the item on the auction house, then use that gold to buy an item that you can use.  The auction house takes a 15% fee for each transaction, which can get quite expensive when you start dealing with items worth multiple millions.

There is also a Real Money Auction House (RMAH).  In the RMAH you can buy and sell most in game items for, yep, real money.  To do this you have to jump through many hoops put in place by Blizzard (the company that makes the game).  In order to use it you must have an authenticator, which you can get for free as smart phone app, or order through their store fore something like $6.  It gives you a six digit code you have to enter occasionally, without it even someone that had your password would not be able to log in.  If you want to cash your money out to Paypal you must also attach a Cell phone to your account.  They will text your phone if anything suspicious happens, which I never really understood.

Selling an item on the RMAH requires no posting fee, but if sale is successful there are a few fees.  If you sell the item to your Blizzard Balance (it can only be used in the Blizzard store on on the Auction house) there is a $1 fee.  If you choose Paypal as your destination for the sale there is the $1 fee, plus 15% of the sale as another fee.   It seems ridiculously high, but hey, where else can you legally make money by selling items that don't even exist?  It really does work, I have sold many items, the highest of which was for $174.99.  Yes, someone paid me $175 for an in game item. There is a max sale price of $250 on the RMAH.

Final Thoughts

The game is good, but it's not great.  There is really nothing to do at max level once you have defeated the game on inferno.  Player vs. Player combat will be added in patch 1.1 at a later date, but until then there's just not much to do.  I have fun getting items to sell for money, but I think many many...many people have quit due to lack of anything to do at max level.

There have been dozens of exploits for leveling, making gold, and getting loot.  There are still many.  The game was tested only by internal Blizzard testers.  I believe they should have opened it up to at least a closed beta to test for bugs.  For example, for about the first month the best way to get loot was to use an exploit to get to the last part of the game, in a certain area, and break vases, open chests, and loot weapon racks.  As far as I know no one that used this method was banned (unless they also had a program that played for them, yes they exist too).  Early on there was a game breaking bug that allowed wizards to be basically unkillable with a certain spec.

Many of these exploits could have been taken care of in a closed beta.  Even so, I will give the game four out of five.  I think it's a ton of fun, though after 300+ hours I am starting to get a little tired of it.

I didn't go over the random events, but my review is already quite long, so I'll just say there are events in the game that happen some playthroughs and not others.  You could play the game through 10 times an still not get all the random events (though likely many of the ones you did get would be repeats).

Another thing that I didn't mention is multiplayer. There is co-op in the game, but only for up to four people. There is a public match making system, you just pick which quest you want to do and it matches you with random people almost instantly.

Recommended: Yes