Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred Review: Ya hate to see it

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Diablo 4’s Lord of Hatred arrives at a weird time. If you were to login today and compare it to the base game at launch, you’d be completely lost as nearly every major system has undergone some degree of overhaul in the intervening years.

Gear customization, the levelling experience, end game activities – it’s almost all different, updated through changes that come down season after season. So what, then, does the latest yearly expansion for Diablo 4 offer? Believe it or not, a whole host more changes to existing systems, some new classes, and a continuation of the remarkably solid story laid down in Vessel of Hatred.

As mentioned, Lord of Hatred brings with it two new classes, though one of them has technically been available for some time already. The Paladin, your classic sword and board, hammer-tossing and overly judgemental puritan, was shadow dropped late last year and has been tearing up Sanctuary ever since. Rocketing straight to the top of tier lists everywhere, Diablo 4’s Paladin definitely left an impression, but it’s largely passive playstyle was a miss for me.

Many of the top builds for the Paladin revolve around some variation of area of effect spells, often the auras the class is so known for. With those equipped you just sort of… run around, while things die from the sheer brilliance of your presence. While undoubtedly powerful, its gameplay itself is far from engaging.

Thankfully the other class joining the roster with Lord of Hatred’s launch, the Warlock, is far more interesting. Where the Paladin is all sunshine, lollipops, and god rays, the Warlock is instead dark, dingey, and downright demonic. Offering the first true summoner class in Diablo 4 – sorry Necromancer – the Warlock calls forth hordes of demons to do their bidding.

I’ll be the first person to acknowledge that build crafting and optimisation are not my forte. I’m not a number cruncher, and I usually just pull up a build guide and follow it to the letter when smashing through end game content. This can lead to pre-release review periods feeling like a bit of a slog, though I’m pleased to report that new skill trees have made that a thing of the past.

Blizzard has expanded trees for classes, rejigging them to be both clearer and more diverse. Then they’ve also removed the cost associated with experimenting. Historically, if you wanted to change up your build you’d have to fork up an exponentially growing amount of gold to move your skills around. Now it’s as easy as just refunding and reallocating the points, letting you try all sorts of combinations on the fly.

In my time with the Warlock, I was able to try out three distinct variations – two based on the skill tree options alone and the third thanks to a random Legendary drop. At first, I tried a pure summoner, unleashing hordes of lesser demons on my foes. With a few more levels under my belt, I unlocked the ultimate skills, and so naturally I experimented with those, landing on a build centred around transforming into a demon myself.

All the while I was able to test different combinations of skills and their modifiers to find the ones that were both fun to use and major damage dealers. The freedom and clarity of the new skill trees took me by surprise, and I ended up spending a lot longer than I probably should have tinkering with different abilities as I journeyed through Skovos.

Speaking of Skovos, this is the first time we’ve journeyed to this particular corner of Sanctuary. The isles that make up the region are some of the oldest parts of the world, and were the cradle of humanity – being the site of the first civilization seen on the world. To say that Skovos is inspired by Ancient Greece or Rome would be a gross understatement, you can almost feel the inspiration leeching out of it as you journey through it’s windswept plains through the Lord of Hatred campaign.

Playing through the campaign was akin to experiencing hell itself. From the outset, it’s clear that Blizzard wants to wrap up the Hatred saga – the overarching narrative that’s been underway since Diablo 4’s launch – and have a clean slate going forward. This is demonstrated almost immediately, as all the setup from the previous expansion is just… swept away.

The story itself is chock full of soppy attempts to pluck at your heartstrings. Twists are blatantly foreshadowed – the final acts revelations are obvious from the outset, and yet somehow, they still don’t land. The storytelling is ham-fisted, with themes rammed down your throat so blatantly that characters will speak them verbatim several times rather than risk you failing to catch on.

Your accompanying NPCs are too happy to slowly meander from place to place, dumping exposition on you as you wait minutes to be able to progress. I lost count of how many times I had to stand there, waiting for X NPC to shuffle 10 metres so that I could talk to them again.

Then there’s the in-campaign objectives. It felt like every single mission had at least one or two “Survive the Ambush” moments that amounted to you standing still for three minutes, killing a couple waves of slow spawning mobs, before you could move on.

If that’s not bad enough, the pacing of the plot itself is shocking. You’ll spend what feels like an age doing next to nothing important, only to have a veritable house of cards’ worth of plot dropped on you out of nowhere, before once again wading back into a shallow slog afterwards.

Progression often grinds to a halt, and rather than building to a climatic confrontation you’ll be left suffering whiplash. They even have the nerve to force you to backtrack right at the end, killing any excitement that you’d managed to muster going into the last showdown.

While I acknowledge that nobody is buying this for the story, this is easily the worst one I’ve seen in a Diablo game – and maybe one of the worst I’ve ever had the displeasure of reviewing. Characters act, well, completely out of character. Events aren’t motivated by the urge to tell a good story but rather by the end goal its writers wanted to reach, which leads to all of the aforementioned problems with the pacing and the plot feeling erratic.

While the campaigns in the base game and Vessel of Hatred were hardly showstoppers, I can’t help but feel that Lord of Hatred would have benefited from simply not having a campaign at all. It would have been better than whatever this is.

Thankfully other systems go a long way to making up for absolutely dire state of the campaign. Aside from the two new classes and reworked skill trees, Lord of Hatred also brings with it the new Talisman system and the return of the Horadric Cube.

Talismans are a novel concept – one of the big points of discussion among the Diablo community has been the possibility of reintroducing item sets to enable for big, identity changing builds like we saw in Diablo 3. On one side people are keening for the concept, as the simplicity and game-changing nature of the sets opens up exciting ideas and playstyles. On the other people are decrying the idea, claiming that it makes most other items redundant.

Talismans solve this issue by introducing a whole new gear slot in your inventory devoted entirely to the system. As you grind your way through Sanctuary you’ll find charms that provide nice bonuses. Some give you more experience, while others buff certain resistances or other stats. Eventually you’ll start finding set charms that provide far more impactful bonuses, similar to what we saw in Diablo 3 set gear. While I didn’t find any particularly thrilling pieces in my time, this talisman system seems to walk the line between the two camps and gives legendary powers ample room to shine still.

Finally, there’s the War Plans. If you’re a Path of Exile or Last Epoch player, then you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with the mapping or Monolith systems from those games – War Plans are Blizzard’s attempt at bringing those into Diablo 4. War Plans let you chain together a string of end game activities, such as Kurast Undercity, Lair Bosses, Dungeons, and the like, with the eventual goal of getting some extra rewards upon completion.

Mapping and the Monolith both function as core end game systems in their respective titles – places that highly tuned builds can blast through for end game resources and gear. The Diablo 4 implementation though feels… lacking. Rather than a diverse and exciting new way to play, it comes off more as a way to complete a variety of activities in your day-to-day grind – hardly an exciting prospect.

Looking objectively at what Lord of Hatred offers, it’s a hard sell. The Warlock is good, but the Paladin has been available for some time already (with a preorder sure, but available nonetheless). The end game additions aren’t particularly exciting – the skill tree reworks offer some good quality of life improvements and meaningful changes but the War Plans are really just the same old content in a shiny new wrapper.

Then there’s the story. As I mentioned, it’s downright awful and not worth your time to even engage with. You’ll have to though, at least once, if you want to unlock War Plans and get proper access to the Lord of Hatred end game.

On its own, Lord of Hatred isn’t worth your time. If you think of it as unlocking another year of Diablo 4 content though, and resolve to put the shambolic events of the expansion behind you, then it’s fine. It continues to build and improve upon the game’s core systems and, at the end of the day, it’s still a ton of fun to blow up hordes of demons.

Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred was reviewed using a promotional early access on Windows PC via Battle.net, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.