The game is basically just endless hack-and-slash-ing -- I know that’s what a dungeon crawler is supposed to be, but it didn’t manage to make that interesting or fun.

When we started off in story mode, we were basically just steamrolling our enemies for an hour. Then we realized that Endless of God also features an autoplay function, with which you can literally let the game play itself for you. Since none of the early challenges were difficult enough, the AI could breeze through countless missions.

All that was left for us to do was to upgrade our hero’s skills, weapons and attributes. Or you can visit a bunch of peripheral sections of the game, such as the Daily Log-in and Daily Giveaways, to claim rewards.

Although much of the fun of Diablo lies in allowing players to forge precious weapons, its combat system is what drew a lot of people in. But in Endless of God, combat felt dull and insipid.

Equipped with one normal attack and four special attacks, which were laid out in a fan shape in the bottom right corner of the touchscreen, our hero -- who is a mage -- was just relentlessly releasing spells one after another. While the animations look very flashy, those moves end up looking very similar without much differentiation.

In all honesty, during the first hour I played this game, I didn’t even know nor did I care what spells I was casting. For me, it was just dealing damage to enemies all the same. What’s more, rarely did I run out of mana since my character automatically drank potions before I could exhaust it.

Storytelling is also a big component in Diablo, but it was quite bland in this game. Despite its gothic aesthetics and grim environment, the story mode started off with missions about an investigation into a sewage-dwelling sea monster and an army mutiny, which are not exactly epic cliffhangers to say the least.

But look, if this game is anything, it merely provides a glimpse into what a Diablo game on mobile could look like. Judging from what we saw from the trailer, Diablo Immortal already includes many more innovative combat techniques, such as deploying grapplers to jump over monsters and using hooks to yank enemies in.

One weird quirk about Diablo Immortal being co-developed by NetEase is that their bigger rival Tencent owns a stake in Activision Blizzard. But Blizzard has long had a relationship with NetEase, which publishes all of its games in China.

Meet NetEase, China’s second-largest game publisher

Of course, without actually being able to play Diablo Immortal, it’s hard to say how good it is -- or how close NetEase’s game is to Blizzard’s game. But I hope it’s pretty different, because Endless of God is not a fun game.

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