Diablo 4: Vessel Of Hatred review: mildly pleasant clicking in very pretty jungles

Write travel journalism to imaginary places, my spaghetti once spelled out. Do package holidays count? In Nahantu’s jungles, I linger to take shots of vines spilling from verdigris-kissed cages, of footfall-slicked stone paths and mesoamerican mosaics. Even Vessel Of Hatred’s malignancy feels like a grimly gorgeous tourist trap. Trip Advisor-recommended cyclopean polyps. TikTok viral demonic cysts. I’ve even got a leopard cub to pose with. He’s not sedated, promise. He’s just like that. I told him how much the ultimate edition costs and he’s been catatonic ever since.

I’d like to stick around, but I keep getting ushered along to the next leg of the tour. There are mobs to pop into goo like ripe spots, each fight as slick and frictionless as a pygmy hippo in a butter bath. There are a dozen different tiered resources and event types designed to make repetition feel like progress, until hell freezes over then melts again. It’s fine, Blizzard packed me some wellies. It’s all so comfortable I suspect they’d have thrown in some Xanax and a back rub if they could.

For context, I gave Diablo 4 three stars. In her review for RPS, Alice Bell (RPS in peace) talked about how easy it was lose hours to the game. It might be even easier to commit time-icide with Vessel Of Hatred. It’s a pleasant, generous font of synapse tickles and good boy points, carved beautifully.

But time easily spent and time well spent are two different things. Diablo 4 is what I play when I’m too exhausted to go through the hassle of thinking or feeling anything. There’s value in having something that fills that niche, but whenever I do, I feel like Homer pounding crab juice. It tastes a little flat to begin with, and loses more flavour with every popped ring pull but, god, does it go down smooth. This here vessel contains a mildly more pleasant brew. It makes good on the word ‘expansion’ with some transformative options for buildcraft, but it only makes the moment marginally more substantive or interesting. I’d call it time neutrally spent, but I’m honestly quite happy to go something else now. My vessel runneth over, and also down my leg a little.

The power of God and Animorphs are on your side with the new Spiritborn class. I’m sure there are plenty of neat crossover builds, but basic progression is funnelled along one of four different jungle pals: jaguar, eagle, gorilla, and centipede, which was my pick. It’s centred around weakening enemies with poison, healing yourself, grinding down mobs to within an inch of their lives, then pressing the fun button to summon a vomiting bugzilla and watch the word "executed" jostle for space between the big numbers. It’s a great move, even if it feels a little like playing Mortal Kombat: Self Assessment Tax edition.

I experimented briefly with the other builds, but none felt as good. If you told me that activation timings or target priority become serious considerations in the game’s tippy-toppiest challenges, I’d believe you - although I do harbour some scepticism toward the combat design of an endgame that seems primarily about who can trivialise it the hardest. Combat in Diablo 4 feels like an intentionally sensory experience rather than a tactical one. Bugzilla’s exact synergies and rhythms just felt right to me, and the accompanying pyrotechnic filth carnival was only rivalled by the ultimate itself. He even follows you around for a bit once summoned, preventing the catastrophic depression that comes from using an ultimate too early. His bugliness is the best thing in the whole expansion.

Bugzilla may not stick around for as long as I'd like, but you can at least hire some new mates. You can have one follow you around permanently like an AI party member, and one more to summon temporarily whenever you perform a specific ability of your choosing, which they’ll follow up with one of their own. I encountered four of these mercenaries, one from the main story and three others from optional sidequests. Alongside the new slottable runes, there’s a throughline of “if X, then Y” build tinkering, adding a sliver of extra programming to your quest to build an auto-battling mulch bot. The mercenaries even have their own skill trees with multiple options. I do not doubt that players who are in to buildcraft are going to eating exceptionally well with these new toys.

Vessel Of Hatred’s story centres around Neyrelle’s struggle to keep Mephisto confined, like a bedroom spider, between the mug and magazine she trapped him in. It’s taking a big toll on her. Characters enjoy reiterating this frequently. At the same time, she’s being hunted by a Cathedral Of Light zealot named Urivar and his big knights. Urivar is an excellent villain for the, oh, six minutes and one boss fight he’s on screen for. After a scrape, your wanderer wakes up in Nahantu, and meets a local named Eru. He’s a sagey healer type fond of Fight Club tier philosophical musings like “to deny your pain is to deny yourself.” Together, you enlist the help of Nahantu’s mysteries to help Neyrelle, and story goes from there. My main opinion on it is that I have a new appreciation for how much not-much you can get away with when it’s coming out of Ralph Ineson, who’s very absent here.

Diablo 4 has always struck me as lacking confidence in its own presentation, despite some wonderfully grim worldbuilding and gorgeous prose sitting beside the “this sounds like something Dante would have wrote, stick it in” bits. The original story was wonderfully bleak at times, but also felt self-conscious about needing to be darker than Diablo 3 while still palatable enough for mass appeal. Vessel Of Hatred frontloads its bleakness and body horror and then shifts into plucky adventure mode. Lots of platitudes. Some stoner mysticism. The power of friendship. There’s a few good moments, but the plot could have been an email, and feels thinly stretched and laboured as a result. There’s a scene where a character chows down on a heart, but the camera is very shy about it, so all you get is some sloppy noises and, hilariously, a subtitle that says “chewing”. I suppose you can’t risk making me feel discomfort or disgust in the demons-inflicting-unspeakable-anguish-on-mankind game.

But the real heartmuncher is this: I fundamentally cannot trust any design decision in this thing to stem from a place of genuine creative intent, and it taints the entire experience. Diablo Immortal was barely two years ago, and I can’t accept that the same behavioural psychology that allowed that thing to rake in spending wasn’t applied here in some way. You can silo off microtransactions to cosmetics, but that doesn’t stop me feeling like I’m being retained in some way - like I’m not being guided on a quest, more just taken for a ride. Unfair of me? Almost definitely. There is talent and passion and vision and hard, hard work here. Sins of the father and all that. But it’s hard to enjoy an apple when I can’t shake the sensation I’m being whispered at to take another bite.

An example: The first two attacks every character will get are a left mouse basic that generates a resource, then a right button core that spends the resource. The basic is quick and light and generally a bit weak and unsatisfying, and the core is beefier and much more fun to use. So, even within the first two levels of the build, Diablo 4 has already trapped you in this loop that has nothing to do with player expression and everything to do with chasing micro-highs. It’s great game design in the same way salt nicotine was great chemistry. This isn’t a problem unique to this expansion of course, and my centipede Spiritborn specifically does feel very agile when performing this basic combo. But again: fairly or not, I feel like what this game wants from me is not passion, but compulsion.

I do not fundamentally dislike GaaS on principle. I like Destiny 2 because encounters feel exciting and intentional, even though it pulls a lot of the same trickery and synthetic progression. I like Helldivers 2 because it sells me on the idea of occupying a doomed grunt in a forever war, and because its moments of tension are cinematically vivid beyond belief. I like Vermintide because a single large ratman has more personality than any of Diablo’s demons, with the possible exception of a fun worm I found named “shocking frother”. I sort of liked Vessel Of Hatred because, I dunno, it was a couple of low stress work days that felt short, didn’t annoy me very much, and occasionally made me go “ah, cool! It’s a big centipede! That’s cool!”.

And it is a very cool centipede. And next time I’m too burnt out to even exist outside of bed without the effortless structure this game is very good at lending to otherwise dead time, I’m sure I’ll be glad for the additions Vessel Of Hatred makes. It’s just very hard to get excited about, and some real excitement is what Diablo 4 needed. I might well book another ticket the next time a new destination gets added, but I’ll asking for podcast recommendations for the trip.