If you are a Nintendo Switch owner and love action role-playing games (ARPGs), Diablo II Resurrected “maybe” a good addition to your game library. But why good and not awesome? There’s already a superior ARPG experience on the Switch in the form of Diablo III: Eternal Collection.

Never mind the colour palette, Diablo III has all the quality-of-life improvements one would expect as a sequel to Diablo II, and it is one heck of a looker as well. With the ability to switch between offline and online games, Diablo III on the Nintendo Switch introduced a great way to grind just about anywhere back in 2018.

Diablo II Resurrected is a remaster of the original Diablo II released back in 2000, upgrading its graphics with support for up to 4K (at least on the PC), network functions and Dolby Surround Sound. Aside from the shared stash, the core gameplay is untouched. However, playing this remaster on the Switch gives a very strong impression that Blizzard has a miss on this platform, although not as tragic as WarCraft III: Reforged for the PC.

Gaming-on-the-go and gamepad support were reasons why I put money down for D2R on the Switch. I found out though that offline and online characters are exclusive in their play modes. If you want your character to persist between devices, online characters are the way to go with both Battle.net and an active Internet connection being prerequisite requirements. You cannot switch (no pun intended) your online character to be offline in the event of poor Internet connectivity (or vice versa).

This renders the role of offline characters to be… superfluous. Why bother spending time levelling up an offline character which you’ll be never be able to bring into online games, or share loot with your online characters. At most, the offline character is relegated to some sort of redundant test mule to test out builds (but never to share gear).

This issue with offline/online characters is confounded by the problems that Blizzard had with their Battle.net servers. Gamers were unable to get connected (and thus use their online characters) for weeks and although the situation has improved tremendously, I did lose a fair bit of game time with my online Necromancer and I didn’t want to waste my time with my offline Amazon.

Rarely one would make the case of superior graphics for a reason to get a game on the Switch, given the platform’s hardware capabilities. I did mention that Diablo III managed to look sweet on Nintendo’s hybrid console. In this aspect, D2R on the Switch doesn’t look too bad, but in some areas the graphics are less detailed and look washed out (Flayer Jungle / Spider Forest, here’s looking at you!).

Diablo 2: Resurrected on the PC is where all the bell and whistles are at and I own a copy of the game as well. Here’s one thing you probably didn’t notice about the PC version and it is also the one-thing that Diablo III didn’t have for the PC: Controller Support. Remember, the awesome controller scheme was one of the reasons why I ditched whatever I came up with on D3 PC to restart everything on the Switch.

Instead of using a keyboard and mouse, I use a Xbox Core Wireless Controller (Shock Blue) to play Diablo II Resurrected on the PC, and it has been a blast. The main advantage a controller has is that you can easily map skills to the buttons/triggers so that you can access them in the heat of hack-and-slashing with ZERO fuss.

The choice of which version to of D2R to go for is inverse versus Diablo III. It’s overwhelmingly pointing to the PC. Not only do I enjoy a superior control scheme I also get the awesome graphics to boot. No thanks to being forced to use online characters exclusively and Battle.net connectivity issues screwing up gaming on the go, I’m better off on the PC as well.

Diablo II: Resurrected (PC) gets a 4.5/5 while Diablo II: Resurrected (Nintendo Switch) gets a 3.5 out of 5.