Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition Impressions

I've played a lot of Diablo III and Reaper of Souls on PC. 

Which means that, content wise, I've already seen pretty much everything the newly released Ultimate Evil Edition has to offer. In fact, the only reason I bought it at all was because, like last year's vanilla Diablo III console ports, it offers local co-operative play, something me and my partner have been dying to jump into. 

As expected, local co-op alone is worth the price of entry, even if you already own the game on another format. What's more, Blizzard have done an excellent job of porting the game to the Playstation 4; only pixel level scrutiny would reveal any real difference between this and the PC version running with all settings maxed, and the controller-friendly interface changes are easy to get to grips with. Indeed, having direct control over your character with the left stick feels more natural than you might expect.

The only minor niggle here is a curious one. The PC versions of both Diablo III and Reaper of Souls offer ample statistics for players to make informed skill choices as they progress; expressing death-dealing potential as a percentage of weapon damage, for example. The Ultimate Evil Edition, however, features only an abstract description of what each one does, adding a frustrating and unnecessary element of trial and error to character building. Maybe Blizzard thought console gamers would be turned off by all those big, scary numbers. 

Whatever the reason, it's hardly grounds to skip the Ultimate Evil Edition of Diablo III. On the contrary, game comes highly recommended to all but the most ardent keyboard and mouse zealots.

UPDATE:

Well, it turns out that buried deep within the gameplay options is the ability to restore the aforementioned missing facts and figures to the skills menu. Why it's disabled by default remains a mystery, but the fact it's there at all renders my one and only misgiving moot. Essential gaming.