Diablo Immortal‘s post-launch support has seen it become a staggeringly massive experience. Numerous updates have included multiple campaigns, unique activities, and even two classes not present anywhere else in the franchise. Yet across all those updates and content drops the titular Diablo has not appeared in the mobile ARPG. That is until now with the game’s final update for 2024, Shattered Sanctuary.
The flagship feature of Shattered Sanctuary is its continuation of Diablo Immortal‘s main quest. The new questline takes players to the biggest zone in Diablo Immortal, known as the World’s Crown. The quests see the player fighting back against the rising influence of the Lord of Terror in the region, culminating in an explosive boss fight against Diablo himself.
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The quest and region are both standard Diablo fair. The World’s Crown enjoys some interesting visual design elements and is populated with a few different factions of enemies. There are humans stricken with insanity or corrupted to being little more than monsters themselves simply by looking at Diablo, cultists that worship Diablo, and some demons under his control for players to chop their way through. The enemies all feel right at home in the franchise, but none of them do enough to stand out from all the other rabble series fans have spent years killing by now.
Diablo Immortal needs to take a larger chance at using the franchise mythos.
While Shattered Sanctuary’s questline tries its best to build up to the big confrontation with Diablo, it does very little to add to the mythos surrounding the iconic villain. It instead is content to tread familiar ground, making the whole questline feel cheap in comparison to the franchise’s recent improvements in storytelling elsewhere.
Thankfully, the final confrontation with Diablo fares slightly better. Engaging boss fights is a critical component of the franchise, and Immortal‘s Diablo fits the bill well enough. With impactful attacks, fun set-dressing, and mechanics that are engaging to play around, he does well enough.
The only downside to his newest iteration is the baggage from all the ones that came before. Players have been able to fight Diablo so many times in other games that the fight with him added in Shattered Sanctuary just doesn’t feel that different or interesting.
For the endgame players, Shattered Sanctuary also introduces a new challenge dungeon system. Available on a limited pool of dungeons, challenge dungeons allow players to run through dungeons that are made more difficult than ever before. When starting a challenge dungeon, it is generated with two random modifiers that buff the enemies, debuff player abilities, or add more interesting changes, such as occasionally spawning pools of lava on the dungeon floor.
Shattered Sanctuary evolves the endgame for Diablo Immortal.
To balance out the challenge the dungeons have a higher chance to drop potent loot while also giving players a guaranteed set item for their first clear each week. The new system is a welcome addition to help mix up dungeon grinds a bit with the modifiers and a more consistent method of hunting set items goes a long way as well. However, it is hard to not feel a bit disappointed by the familiarity of the system.
One of Immortal‘s strongest aspects was its willingness to experiment with activities and systems in ways the mainline games never have. There is nothing wrong with the new challenge dungeon system on its own, but it is disappointing that it feels so bog-standard when compared to other titles with similar features.
On top of the challenge dungeons and new main quests, Shattered Sanctuary also brings a selection of smaller bits of content. Firstly, there are three new helliquary bosses that each bring some challenging new boss fights to the system.
There are also three more inferno levels of difficulty for players to grind through. Then there are three new legendary gems to grind for, a new progression track called Seeker’s Path that raises combat rating by completing activities, and an idle familiar mechanic to help you grind resources.
Much like the quests and challenge dungeons, the rest of the new content in Shattered Sanctuary feels underwhelming. Adding more variety and a few new options for players to explore is always good, but none of the update’s additions are exciting or compelling in a way that makes me want to play Diablo Immortal. Instead of feeling like an interesting step forward for the mobile spin-off that has been so successful in carving its niche within the franchise, it feels more like a nostalgic slip backward.
Diablo Immortal is available now on Android, iOS, and PC.
