Diablo 3 Taste Test, Couch Co-op at it's finest.

Beer in the fridge? Pizza on it's way? Four controllers hooked up to the console? Well get three friends over, because it sounds like you're ready for Diablo 3 on console.

There's something great about organising to meet at a friend's house to play a co-op game. Usually you tell people it starts at 6:00pm but for some reason, you never get into the game until 9:00pm. From that point on it becomes a night of pizza, accidental (but really deliberate) team-killing, beer, bragging and OMFG moments. This is, of course, until the morning light washes away all the fun from the room, and you begin to realise that you've been playing the same game for 9 hours straight and you wonder what excuse you're going to tell your partner.

I can easily see Diablo 3 turning into one of these games for one of these nights. I had a chance to play the game early at an event put on by IGN and Blizzard and I had a blast sitting on a couch bashing my way through the demons from hell with 3 other guys, and the free beer and pizza was flowing.

The game translates perfectly to console, and I was able to pick-up the controls in no time at all. All the character's abilities are mapped to one of the buttons, so switching between abilities is the press of a button. I like the way the game also had hot keys for items you've just picked-up, it clearly indicated which item was better so you could quickly swap it out and drop the trash if need be and continue dungeon crawling without pausing. Most importantly though, the game now features a dodge-roll move which is mapped to the right stick, so obviously, everyone rolled across the terrain to the next object ala Ocarina of Time.

Couch co-op in Diablo 3 brought back memories of playing Castle Crashes with my friends or even playing Golden Axe at the arcades with my family when I was younger. I could certainly see myself bashing through it again and again with different groups of friends.

To summarise, I have written a Haiku about Diablo 3 and the co-op experience:

The crisp taste of beer
Diablo played on a couch
Fun Demons to kill.


Having not been able to pick this one up when it was initially released for the PC, I'm very psyched to pick this one up on consoles.

Cheers

Tim