Diablo IV is one of the biggest games out right now and if you're a gaming parent you might find yourself with a hankering to play the popular action RPG while the kids are up. But you also remember that this game is like a late 90's Hot Topic, overly edgy and depressing. Demons, blood, creatures of all sort, and about as much light as a basement closet.
So how do you get that ARPG fix in while the kids are awake? Well, luckily there are quite a few games that actually tackle this well without having to have your kids waking you up at three in the morning because they can't get the idea of a Necromancer out of their heads.
Here's three games that tackle a lot of the things Diablo feels like without exposing your kids to the years of potential therapy Diablo might come with.
Marble Knights
We're going to start simple. Unfortunately, though, this is only for people with Mac and iPhone but the Mac version is where I want to focus because the same system multi-player is pretty good.
Marble Knights, from the waist up, looks like your traditional fantasy genre type game. Knights, magicians, kings, and kingdoms. Yes, there are some robots too but let's ignore that for now. Let's zoom the camera out and you'll notice that from the waist down every character has had their legs replaced with a marble.
Yup, like some sort of weird mermaid, all the characters move around via a rolling marble. This creates a fun situation in which you have to change the way you move, curving around corners and carefully navigating narrow bridges.
You choose between one of four characters. They run the traditional gambit of barbarian, rogue, wizard, and...robot (ignore it). But all characters play exactly the same so you'll never have to worry about one person playing the character you're good with because it's all the same.
While there isn't any form of loot in the game, your attacks are changed by finding other marbles throughout the stage. For example, a flaming marble not only adds burning to your attacks, but your charged up move also fires fireballs in eight directions.
Very simple controls combined with a fun control style that lends a level of chaos to everything equals a game worth syncing controllers to your Macbook for.