Want to relive the glory days of Diablo2? Feel like hacking & slashing? These are the top 6 Diablo Clones.

6. Dungeon Siege

“You begin as a humble farmer, and as you travel through the world and gain new skills, you can gather a party of up to eight characters to aid you. Dungeon Siege impels the player into one over-the-top battle after the other as the storyline unfolds and a larger plot begins to reveal itself.” - Official Site

Dungeon Siege is Microsoft’s take on Diablo, extremely pretty graphics but not much gaming depth. When released it brought together all the latest and greatest graphic developments and combined them into a seamless world, the musical score was equally impressive with the recruitment of BAFTA Award winnning Jeremy Soule to do the scoring.

Although it’s a decent game the main problem is it feels too simplistic, as when I explored the world all I felt I had to do was click move and loot… strangely for a Hack & Slash style game I didn’t have to click to attack often, instead if any enemy came near my characters it would be auto attacked and auto pursued till it died, and if there was another enemy nearby my characters would automatically go and attack that as well, hence the highlight of the combat system seems to be occasionally pressing ‘H’ to heal when your health gets low.

Curiously though despite the lack of gameplay in Dungeon Siege it still feels like a decent game, and is worth checking out.

There has been a movie based on the game released, but I wouldn’t recommend watching it.
Dungeon Siege 2 is also out, worth a check but nothing really impressive.

5. Titan Quest

Titan Quest is the second to latest Diablo clone released, hence it wouldn’t be wrong to expect it to be able to use all the previously built up Hack & Slash games features and be able to expand upon them… but alas it didn’t.

Titan Quest like Dungeon Siege had outstanding visuals for its time, Titan Quest has also finally done the feature correctly of being able to see every item you equip detailed on your character, monster design is decent and you’ll find nearly all Monster’s are taken from mythology, although compared to D2 monsters they don’t feel as they have much personality(/difference).
NPCs are similar, but they all feel very generic and there is never really any connection between the player and the NPCs except for getting quests.

Although the game has a very strong opening it starts to fall apart just over the midway point(10-15 hours in), mainly because how unbalanced the skills are, some classes it becomes nearly impossible to defeat bosses without spending hours grinding, like if you try being a tank you’ll get into nothing but problems however if you are a ranged class or have a pet you’ll find the game a walk in the park.

Again despite how negative I’ve made it sound, it’s still a darn fun game to play, especially cooperative play with your friends.

4. Divine Divinity

Evil threaten the worlds and it’s up to you to save it… (a touch generic, but so are most the plots)

Divine Divinity suffers from one of the more unusual titles, but don’t let it fool you its still by far one the best Diablo Clones.

Divine Divinity has three classes to pick from, a Fighter, Mage and Survivor (thief), unique to DD is depending on what gender you pick for your characters it will effects your skills, hence it’s almost like having 6 classes.

DD graphics are decent but nothing ground breaking, it’s a 2D game(2D sprites & maps) viewed from a isometric view point. Nonetheless it’s quite clear after a short amount of playing that a lot of detail has been put into the character & NPC model art.

A sequel for Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity was released in 2004… It doesn’t play as well as the original but it is still a decent game, as a bonus if you buy Beyond Divinity you get a copy of Divine Divinity bundled with it for free.

3. Sacred Gold

A warmongering demon has been let loose on your world, it’s up to you to collect the five elements of Ancarnia and use them to return the demon from whence it came.

Sacred has a unique selection of characters, you can pick from 6 different classes, Gladiator, Dark Elf, Wood Elf, Vampiress, Battle-Mage or the Seraphim.
The Dark Elf plays like a rogue, the Wood Elf like a hunter. The Seraphim and Vampiress are quite unique classes, the Seraphim being an Angel uses holy powers to vanquish the enemies and plays a bit like a jill-of-all-trades, good at both magic and melee but not great at either. The Vampiress is what it’s name implies a female vampire, it plays similar to a warrior except has the advantage/disadvatage of being stronger during the night and weaker during the day.
Also uniquely depending on which class you pick will affect how the NPCs interact with you.

The skill system in sacred is quite unique as well, to level up your skills you have to find the right ruins for your skills, it can make it taxing at times but you normally find so many runes that it plays pretty well.

Sacred is one of the few Diablo clones that actually reference and pays homage to its forefather(*ahem*. Diablo), multiple times you’ll see references to Diablo, Sacred even contains a rebuild of Diablo’s Tristham.

There have been multiple releases of Sacred but Sacred Gold is the best release, it contains; The original Sacred, the Sacred Plus expansion, and the final expansion Sacred Underworld.

2. Nox

You play as a middle-aged man named Jack who after a bizarre accident is transported to the World of Nox, upon your arrival in Nox you can choose between being becoming a Warrior, Wizard or Conjurer, it’s now up to you to defeat the evil sorceress Hecubah if you are ever to return home.

Nox is my personal favorite Diablo clone and it is definitely an under appreciated gem, there is only three classes to pick from but each feels and plays noticeably different to the others, each class also has their own unique storyline and ending, oddly enough I enjoyed the single player more in Nox then I did in Diablo.

The gameplay is pretty simplistic, left click to move and right click to attack, you also have the standard spells sets each with a variety of different spells depending on which class you are.
There’s also a blast to be had in multiplayer, especially in CTF and Arena mode.

The main problem with Nox is EA took control of Nox off Westwood, shortly after taking control EA decided to no longer support Nox so it could focus on other games…

Hence now there is no official servers, no more updates after the 1.2 patch and no official support. Fortunately a Nox fan group has picked up the torch and still regularly hosts and plays multiplayer games.

1. Witcher

“Witchers are monster-hunters who receive special training and have their bodies modified at an early age to provide them with supernatural abilities so they can battle extremely dangerous monsters and survive” - Wikipedia

The Witcher follows the tale of Geralt, one of the few surviving witchers. At the beginning of the story he has lost all his memories, it’s up to you to help him recovery his memories, stolen secrets and vanquish hordes of enemies.

The Witcher originally thought by many to be the next Baldur’s Gate didn’t quite make it far enough into the tactical RPG direction and instead became a Action RPG like Diablo (*yay*), although you can definetly see it closing the gap between the two.

Why is it the best?, a great deep storyline(based on a series books), great gameplay with the introduction of timing controled combat, lots of dialog, interesting Alchemy element and a whole lot of ass kicking.

Witcher is definitely worth getting if you have a Diablo itch that needs scratching.

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Game Covers from http://wikipedia.org.au
All Screenshots from Official Sites except…
Nox Screenshots http://estar.xolympus.org/