Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred Review – My First Diablo, And It Got Its Claws In Fast

I’ll get the embarrassing part out of the way first. Before Lord of Hatred, I had never touched a Diablo game. Not the first one, not the second one that people online still write essays about, not Diablo III, none of the seasons, nothing.

I walked into Sanctuary with zero history and zero nostalgia, which makes me either the worst possible person to review this expansion or the most useful one. If a series this far down its own rabbit hole can grab a total stranger by the collar and refuse to let go, that says something the lifelong fans physically can’t tell you anymore.

So that’s the lens for everything below. Lord of Hatred is the second major expansion for Diablo IV, it’s the chapter where the hunt for Mephisto finally comes to a head, and I showed up halfway through a story everyone else had been living for years. Here’s how that went.

TL;DR

Lord of Hatred is the rare expansion that works on someone who skipped every step before it. The story is genuinely good and not just an excuse to swing a sword; the new region of Skovos is one of the most lived-in worlds I’ve explored in a while, and the voice acting is flat-out exceptional. The first couple of hours bury you in systems, and the default controls fought me hard, but once it clicks, it does not let go. I came in a complete outsider and left a believer.

Story: Walking In On The Final Act

Lord of Hatred does not slow down to hold the new kid’s hand, and weirdly, I respected it for that. The campaign picks up straight out of the previous expansion, with Mephisto’s corruption bleeding outward toward the sacred isles of Skovos while everyone scrambles to keep the Prime Evil from walking freely across Sanctuary.

Mephisto is the Lord of Hatred the title keeps promising, and this is the chapter where the long game finally pays off. Even coming in blind, I was hooked from the opening, which is not a sentence I expected to write about the seventh or eighth hour of a story I’d skipped the first half of.

What surprised me most is that the writing isn’t sprinkled on top of the loot grind to give it an excuse to exist. It’s essential and deliberate; something that a lot of game studios skimp on, especially when they have a very well-established IP. The pacing is tight, the stakes feel real, the campaign runs around eight hours, and none of it felt like filler to me.

There’s a real sense of things building toward a reckoning, an escalation akin to that long tower climb in Prince of Persia: SoT. Skovos being one of Sanctuary’s oldest regions gives the whole thing a weight of history I picked up on even without knowing the lore.

There’s exactly one place in the story, and I fell out. It’s not a real problem, more of a running joke I had with myself. The game treats your character like an irreplaceable hero the world cannot afford to lose. Lovely. Except I’d built that character about forty minutes earlier. “We can’t afford to lose you!” Buddy, we just met.

For a returning player who has carried a beloved hero across multiple expansions, that emotional weight probably lands like a hammer. For a newcomer rolling a fresh face, it’s a bit like a stranger sobbing at your feet on day one. Sweet of them. I hadn’t earned it yet!

Gameplay: It Doesn’t Click Right Away, And Then It Won’t Let Go

Let me be honest about the rough start, because pretending it was smooth would be a lie. The onboarding throws a wall of information at you and hopes some of it sticks. Skills, gear, stats, currencies, systems stacked on top of other systems.

In town it gets worse, because every vendor and panel wants a slice of your attention at once, and with no muscle memory for any of it, I spent my first hour mildly drowning. If I were scoring the onboarding on its own, it’s a 7. Competent, but it could ease you in a lot more gently.

The controls gave me more trouble than the menus did. I started on mouse movement, since that’s apparently the classic Diablo way, and it just never sat right in my hands. Moving and aiming felt slippery and a little vague, like I was suggesting where my character should go rather than telling them.

On a whim, I switched to keyboard movement, and the whole game opened up. Night and day difference. So here’s my one piece of new-player advice: if the game feels off in your first session, change your control scheme before you write it off. I have to give credit to the game’s ease and versatility of control remapping.

Here’s the part that matters, though. Once it clicks, it really clicks. The moment I stopped fighting the systems and started reading them, carving through a screen packed with enemies became stupidly satisfying. You see what works, you see what doesn’t, you tweak, you chase the next upgrade, and then it’s an hour later, and you’ve caught the build hunger this genre is famous for.

The skill trees have been reworked across the board, and the level cap has been pushed up, so there’s a deep pool to swim in if optimizing a character is your idea of a good night.

Lord of Hatred also brings two new classes, the returning fan-favorite Paladin and the brand new Warlock, plus a Horadric Cube, a magical crafting device that lore veterans will recognize as the handiwork of one Zoltun Kulle, a founding member of the Horadrim and the most powerful mortal sorcerer in the Diablo universe.

I lost more time than I’d care to admit just feeding things into that cube to see what would come out the other side. If you’re the type who likes to build, re-tune, and break the game over your knee, oh boy, you will be pleased!

Oh, and then there’s the Talisman. Chef’s kiss.

Visuals & Animation – The Opening Scene Earns Your Trust

The first cinematic of Lord of Hatred does an enormous amount of heavy lifting. It’s gripping. The detail goes down to stuff you’d never notice you noticed, and the animation is so alive it made me sit up before I’d pressed a single button. Whatever went into the presentation, you can see every bit of it on screen, and it bought the game a lot of goodwill before I even reached the messy onboarding.

Then there’s Skovos itself, which is the standout for me. The region is vibrant and varied, but more than that it feels lived in, like the place keeps existing when you turn your back on it. Plenty of game worlds are just attractive corridors you sprint through on the way to the next objective. Skovos in Lord of Hatred has texture and a sense of place that kept dragging me off the main path to go poke around in corners I had no business being in. That’s the highest compliment I can pay a world like this.

Sound & Voice Acting: This Is Where It Goes From Good To Special

If one part of Lord of Hatred expansion is flawless, it’s the voice work, and I’m giving it a 10 with no interest in arguing about it. Ralph Ineson as Lorath is the kind of performance that makes you stop skipping dialogue. That gravel in his voice carries half the mood of the entire game. Jonathan Adams returning as Tyrael is the other anchor, all weight and quiet authority. Between the two of them, every scene they’re in is just better. I’d replay conversations I’d already heard! 

It’s also where the game shows its sense of humor, on purpose or otherwise. At one point I clearly overheard a bit of business about a merchant’s horse that the NPCs have decided, for the merchant’s sake, never to bring up with him.

And a small personal one that genuinely delighted me: Taissa (yes, I played the main campaign as well), which to my ear sounds exactly like “ta3isa” meaning miserable in Arabic! Almost certainly a coincidence. I have chosen to believe it was a deliberate and very mean joke, and you can’t take that from me.

Conclusion: Should You Jump In?

A few months ago I would have told you Diablo wasn’t for me, let alone trying the new Lord of Hatred expansion! I’d never played one and felt no pull to start. Lord of Hatred made that opinion look ridiculous in roughly two sessions.

The opening hours are overwhelming, and the default controls genuinely fought me, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But push through that wall, and you’ve got an expansion with a story worth following and a world worth getting lost in. And the combat turns “just one more pack of enemies” into a genuine personality flaw.

Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred will suck you in, and you will not want to leave.

Blizzard didn’t just set out to please lifelong fans of the franchise. They delivered a DLC good enough to convert someone like me, who’d never touched a Diablo game before, into a loyal fan overnight.

Thank you, Blizzard EU, for sponsoring this review and taking a chance on a newcomer to play Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred