Squint at it on mobile, and it can even look like a genuine next iteration in the series. But it does control better in combat, and it's a nice touch being able to play on both platforms and carry your progress over.)

Don't get carried away: it's a pretty straight port of the mobile game, it's not a bespoke desktop version of it, so the resolution is low and some of touch controls feel out of place as you simulate them with the mouse cursor. (Incidentally, you can also play it on PC, in a beta version of Immortal accessed via. It gives a fairly good look at what it's like in action. But most of the time you can pretty much play Diablo, as hectic as it can be, just fine on your phone. And sometimes the abilities, which are on the other side of the screen, flip direction when I'm trying to deploy them, leaving me to manually, awkwardly, realign them. Sometimes the joystick doesn't pick up my thumb movement, leaving me standing still, which is not great in the middle of battle and has made me shout out in anger a few times. It loads quickly (for me) and plays smoothly, and the virtual joystick on the left tracks my thumb around the screen fairly reliably, and I can fire off abilities with my other thumb, on the other side of the screen, fairly reliably too. The game feels natural in your hands on a phone, too (I'm using a Pixel 6). It genuinely feels like Diablo at its best. And it all makes for a hell of an introduction. Diablo 3 was turgid at the beginning but Immortal throws everything at you from the moment you begin - boss encounters, set pieces, big stuff. And it's not stingy with this stuff either. All the stuff I love about Diablo is here: the fountains of loot, the showpiece bosses, the waves of enemies designed to make you feel powerful as you rip them apart. On the one hand, the core of the game is really good - I'd even go as far as to say it's borderline great. I get huge mixed feelings while playing Diablo Immortal.

Diablo immortals controversy