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This book is impressively terrible. It’s basically a generic Wrong Trousers story (except with haunted armour) pasted over the top of the Diablo universe, but in reality, it has such a loose connection to the source material that it might as well have been based on the Magic Roundabout. It flails madly to establish itself until the half way point, at which point, it leans heavily on references to well-established plot points in Diablo 2, which it still manages to get very wrong. It also conjures up legendary figures from the lore, then abuses and destroys them in the weirdest ways imaginable.

I have played Diablo since I was 8, and I have always wanted to explore the universe outside of the games which, with the exception of Diablo 3, are deliberately light on detail to allow you to focus on the apocalypse. I really wish I hadn’t tapped in to this particular novel, as it takes my favourite game of the series (number 2) and corrupts it in order to try and prop up a deeply unimaginative story which doesn’t really seem to give a crap about the decades of lore that precedes it.

The author’s writing style aims for horror fiction but sits firmly in ao3 Sonic the Hedgehog self-inserts. It thinks that it’s immensely intelligent, but even concepts that should be a home run (shifting pocket dimensions, haunted armour, agents of prime evils) are mutilated and overexplained to the point where they feel mundane. Both female characters exist purely as sexual objects for the protagonist and antagonist, and are routinely rendered helpless and at the mercy of incompetent men for no reason, even though they are both members of two separate and well-established mage orders. On the other end of the spectrum, some characters inserted by the author are so obnoxiously powerful that they actively ignore a giant plot point if Diablo 2 - set several years after - which focuses on a giant crystal built with the express purpose of suppressing the powers inherent in humanity.

I could go on forever. Just don’t read this book if you like Diablo. Christ.