Diablo 4’s Infernal Hordes Are a Reminder of What Makes Diablo So Fun

I haven’t touched Diablo 4 since its original launch in 2023. While I largely enjoyed the campaign and the much darker undertones compared to its predecessor, I ended up falling off before I could even complete the endgame content. A year on, and Diablo 4 is a drastically improved game from what it was at launch, and I’m finally hooked.

Season 4 brought with it a huge overhaul to the game’s itemization. Without getting too into the weeds, suffice it to say that you’re no longer spending as much time as you used to within the game’s menus, and you can focus more on the moment-to-moment gameplay, which is the whole point of it all. With Season 5, titled Infernal Hordes, Blizzard added a new endgame mode to tie everything together, and I think this may be the final missing piece Diablo 4 needed to reach its true potential.

Infernal Hordes is a really simple game mode. You consume an Infernal Compass, get transported to a separate instance, and then you just fight waves and waves of enemies. Each wave throws a whole bunch of enemies at you really quickly, forcing you to make full use of your kit if you want to survive. At the end of each wave, you gain Aether. The more Aether you accrue by the end of a full run, the more chests you’ll be able to open, and that’s how you’ll be able to farm most of the Uniques in Diablo 4 Season 5.

Like I said, it’s simple. But to make things just a bit more interesting, you’ll also get to choose a modifier at the end of each wave to make your run a little harder. For instance, you could have hellfire raining down on you during a wave and then decide to have a Hellborne enemy spawn alongside the hellfire later on. These modifiers grant you more Aether as well and are designed to test your limits and see how far you can push your build before reaching a breaking point.

The best part about Infernal Hordes, though, is that it’s very much a no-frills game mode. I love that the game just plops you into a room and lets you go wild on multitudes of enemies. The core appeal of Diablo 4 has always been the leveling process itself and watching your experience bar go up as you collect gear with bigger numbers and green arrows, and that’s all Infernal Hordes wants to do.

This mode just wants you to feel the satisfaction of decimating groups of enemies with, in my case, terrifying chain lightning bolts that bounce between foes as they get completely melted, then reward me with that sweet, sweet loot at the end. And Paragon points. This is the core of what made the Diablo series so beloved and known for its dangerously addictive nature. The power fantasy and satisfaction that come with melting waves of enemies with the press of a button and watching pale orange words pop out of a chest when you go to claim your loot.

There are some hiccups of course. Nightmare Dungeons are still a slog, and it sucks that you still have to run them for Glyph experience points. I’d much rather be spending all my time running Infernal Hordes than going into a Nightmare Dungeon for minuscule amounts of Glyph XP and virtually no guarantee of getting any Uniques.

There’s also the fact that Infernal Compasses take up consumable slots. While this doesn’t seem like a huge issue at first, those things will stack up very quickly as you continue leveling, especially when you’re also picking up other consumables like your Elixirs and Nightmare Sigils.

These are just nitpicks in an otherwise fantastic season of Diablo 4, though. While I do feel like Nightmare Dungeons are starting to show their age and could probably use a bit of an overhaul in future updates, Diablo 4‘s myriad of systems are finally coming together to create the truly fun and satisfying leveling and endgame experience that I wanted from it at launch. The game is in the best state it’s ever been in, and the future’s looking bright, especially with the Vessel of Hatred expansion coming up in a couple of months.

If, like me, you haven’t touched Diablo 4 since its launch last year, and you’ve been thinking about dipping your feet back in, this is absolutely the season to do it.

Diablo 4 is available to play now.