Harbinger Demo

Alright, I've played through all the demo has let me played through. Here are my intial impressions.

Gameplay: It IS Diablio in space. Right down to the exact same keymapping for similar actions in Diablo II. You kill a guy, he drops something, and you can press ALT to highlight items on the ground. Hold down shift, and you attack from where you stand. Toggle the minimap using TAB. Seem familiar yet? There are three characters, and I chose to play as the human. Each character has a melee attack and a ranged attack. This is where the fun begins. Unfortunately, your ranged attack is much better than your ranged attack, and it also comes with the advantage of avoiding the enemy's melee attacks, which will slaughter you. So the combat is as follows: position, fire, reposition when necessary. This gets very repetitive.

Graphics/Sound: Average at best. What Diablo did very well was ambience. When it was first released (and the game was a challange), it was one of those games where you would want to (or be afraid of, depending on your personality) play it in the dark. Unfortunately, while the graphics in Harbinger are very pretty, they are also very sterile. Nothing is scary or challenges you to round the next corner. There was nothing memorable about the sound. All the items had the same effects when dropped/used, as did the opening of chests and firing of projectiles.

Items/Misc: Again, very similar to Diablo. The weapons and armor have slots in them, in which you can put various mod chips, adding to the effect that various items have. The huge problem is the specificity of the items. While Diablo has class-specific items, everything in this game, right down to the healing potions, is class-specific. If you are a human, you can't use health that's for a gladiator. Most weapons and armor are this way too, and I suppose you could memorize the names and know what is for you and what isn't. But even mod chips are class-specific, and you aren't able to tell for what class a certain chip is unless you pick it up and place it in your inventory (which is incredibly small, by the way).

So, in conclusion, this game wants to be Diablo, but fails on key levels. It is repetitious beyond belief in combat and level design (coming from a guy that loves Diablo), has no atmosphere to speak of, and is further burdened by the uninteresting and confusing armory. Diablo was a click-fest arguably, but a click-fest with an entire universe of unique/rare items, with 7 player classes sporting 30 abilities each. Harbinger just doesn't bring enough to the table to make it fun.