7 years later, the underwhelming "fun" of this game causes me to definitely agree with the original post's sentiments. The dungeons are pretty lame; the level design doesn't even make sense, and seems to be obtuse for the purpose of being obtuse.
For players who can beat novice arena, I suggest to just kill everything in the Dungeon on sight. That way there's no worrying about the moronic experience of having to worry about the behavior of zombies. I beat the first three levels of the dungeon using nothing but the starting spike I got in the first room, simply by destroying every zombie I encountered. The only enemies that gave me any difficulty whatsoever in the first three levels were the skeletons in the burial crypts.
I save-scum this game because I have better things to do with my life than play for five hours just to get the opportunity to die again fighting some enemy I've never encountered before. Falling into a burial plot, and being unable to climb out because my character has no "climb out of coffin" hotkey, and therefore continually stumbles back into the coffin like a moron, is not my idea of a fun way to spend whatever precious hours of my life remain. Nor is falling down just because I ran into a wall corner slightly too fast. Gee, I wonder why Diablo never implemented that "feature".
I use AutoIt to enable camera lock behind my character, disabling it when I press Shift so that I can swing my weapon, because I don't find it fun to juggle eight combat mechanisms simultaneously. Worrying about maintaining cursor position for cursor-relative WSAD movement, while simultaneously using the cursor position to wind up for swings, while simultaneously worrying about camera orientation, while simultaneously maintaining distance and orientation to the enemy, while simultaneously trying to avoid getting my character stuck in the shadows, or backed against a wall, or worse yet, stuck with my leg up against the wall like a moron, while simultaneously needing to shift my mental model of navigation whenever I want to toggle between combat and non-combat mode, is just not my idea of a fun gameplay mechanic.
I'm glad the combat has finally been fixed. It used to be so bad that I could beat arena practice novice mode, and half of arena practice expert mode, just by pummeling my opponents with a naked pudgy old man with no weapons. Enemies were too aggressive, and never retreated, and it was possible to exploit their madness by just getting up in their faces with fists.
Right now I'm "enjoying" the sewers, and especially enjoying how my character can't back up in combat mode without just falling on her ass every time she takes a step backwards in the sewer. The tension of knowing I can't perform a simple task like walking is SO fun! I love tripping on rocks almost as much as I love swinging weapons.
The coolest gameplay mechanism, aside from wandering around lost in the confusing, nonsense maze design because the game doesn't even have a simple map mechanism, even though the game has paper maps and pens, is getting KO'd by an enemy, and then groggily awaking from unconsciousness just for the enemy to walk over and KO me again, and then do that just one more time until I'm dead. WOW, why did I never design a game where a player is helpless to get abused over and over again before finally dying? Such a novel and enjoyable way to spend my time.
