Diablo II Lord of Destruction was released in 2001 and is the expansion pack for Diablo II. If you don't know anything about the game the story goes like this. You choose a character to play and start at level one. The game is divided into acts where you complete quests and receive rewards to progress through the games. As you progress through the acts you gain experience by killing monsters. As you get higher levels your character becomes stronger, new skills are available, and also new items are available to use.

Diablo II LOD adds a new 5th Act to play in the Diablo world. In this act your main quest is to defeat Baal, an evil satanic monster. Many other new monsters and terrain have been added as well. Along with the new act, two new characters were added to the game, the Druid and the Assassin. Both characters have a completely unique skill tree with 30 skills each. Also they added class specific items that only certain character classes can use. One example would be the Assassin is the only character that can use claws as a weapon. This makes each character have their own unique way of fighting which makes the game play more interesting. Maybe the biggest addition of the game was the thousands of new items they added to the game. There are now more unique, rare, magical, and normal items to be found to use on your character.

When playing Diablo II LOD you have the option of playing over the Battle.net servers on the internet or playing single player. Playing over Battle.net opens a new world of possibilities in the game. It allows you to interact with other players to trade items, level faster, and work together. This helps a lot when you are just starting a new character because you and other players can work together to progress farther in the game. The only bad part is you can only join games with a maximum of eight people in it. But don't worry that is more than enough people to kill all the monsters in the game.

The controls of this game are great and very easy to use. You click the mouse to a point on the screen where you want your character to go. When you want to attack you click the mouse on the monster or other player. You can change skills by using hotkeys that you assign to certain keys on the keyboard. As you play your character these become very natural and easy to use. This gives you precise control of your character and is very easy to get accustomed to.

The games music and sound effects are amazing. The music fits the mood of the game quite nicely and the screams of monsters dieing are very real. This makes the action feel like it's around you instead of on the screen.

The graphics were good at the time that the game was released, but they are nothing compared to the games today. The graphics are still adequate and it helps to have a good video card. Beware if you are playing online because there is a lot of "lag" in the game and many times the graphics can't keep up with the pace of the game. This is especially true if you have 56k, but even with cable or DSL there will be some lag.

Overall this game is well worth your money. There is endless replay value because you can always make a new character and once you beat all the acts on normal, nightmare, and hell difficulties, there are still things to do. I would recommend this to anyone who wants a good RPG that will last awhile. It is a great game that you can get hours and hours of playing time out of.