I was considering about making review for a long time. I was thinking how I should judge this game. In the end, it is community who did it. It is one of the worst communities which I had ever encountered. Asking for help or giving critique of any kind will quickly be burried under hardcore elitist community with typical insults of “git good” and similar. If you wish to consider playing this game long term, you have to accept that community is highly toxic, defensive, unmoderated. You will be expected to min max and concent to anything, no matter how outright wrong it might be, because if you do not, you better hide before ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ happens. I had far more pleasant time in Diablo 3 or Path of Exile communities and for this sole reason, I recommend to consider those games if you are on the edge.
Now, I had played excessively veteran mode and I will give feedback only on “new players” experience. Which might involve a lot of gameplay, roughly around 50 hours. I also had experienced expansion content and DLC.
Game itself is quite bad. Mobs tend to be too easy. Bosses are also insultingly easy. Yet, some of them, almost at random are way too strong. Difficulty spikes across the board are a complete mess. You will breeze through final bosses and content only to get far more difficult optional content. It is a game where you can be insta shotted out of nowhere by random boss despite having resistances and your protection levels high.
Another issue is gear. Gear in this game sucks and sucks a lot. It is partly because you are not supposed to get any decent gear. It is all random and if RNG hates you, well tough luck. I hope you like seeing yourself getting weaker and weaker as game progresses for no fault of your own. In addition, as gear being random, it heavily favors more mainstream classes. So forget about making that unique hero which you always wanted, because you are on purpose handicapping yourself heavily. Game has a heavy preferance on certain type of builds and your uniqueness is a flaw which game and this community will brutally punish and oppress. Furthermore, most of the gear which is ought to help you level up, faction gear is locked behind reputation. This means that when gear might be potentially useful, it is locked. Even that is a big IF, because this is a typical old school ARPG where merchants sell just pure crap and thus their sold gear is more often than not just crap. It got so bad that my 50 level blues and legendaries still soundly beat 70-76 level greens, so you can imagine just how bad gearing is in this game.
Now, this game will not allow you to have fun. All the fun things are locked. Nemesis spawns, decent mobs. All locked until you can “prove” that you are worthy. This results in quite bland first playthrough without a decent challenge. Yet, wait. Game has an old classic trick up its sleeve. Expansion is raised way up in difficulty than previous content. Which means, if RNG does not give resistances which are region locked (you are likely to get certain gear in certain regions) then it means you are ♥♥♥♥ out of luck. You are not given essential tools to tackle new mobs which at this point all attack you with flashy elemental attacks of every kind. It is kind of cheap difficulty spike which is hard only because you did not passed an arbitrary gear check.
Then it is progression. You do not deserve any! You cannot complete major devotion objectives, because you are not given enough points. All the most shiny things will be out of your reach if you are anything less than directly aiming for late game goal, ignoring all the highly useful stuff early and in mid chart. Furthermore, progression is slowish. Game for some reason reduces skill point progression from 3 to 2 at level 50 which results in stagnation of your build. Game requires you to invest heavily into single abilities to be most competitive, but if you will do so, you will be faced with very shallow pool of abilities to grind yourself through the game. All in all, you won’t be allowed to have fun in your first playthrough, because “you did not earned it”.
Storytelling is just awful. Don’t get me wrong, story is great in this game, but it is told in awful manner. I hope you love to read random notes as you go, breaking flow of the game and providing small amounts of mostly pointless information about the world. Voice acting is curiously spread paper thin among random NPC, so I hope you love reading a lot of bubble text. Story itself is as predictable as it can get. There are no twists, nothing. You are the God. NPCs are useless. They tell you to own stuff and you do that. You win, everyone is happy and give you hero’s welcome! Except this game does not. Game has absolutely no cutscenes, no closure. Final boss is a joke and easier than some of random content you will find in this game. You will finish this game, you will get a single chat box congratulating for turning in quest and quest line just ends, leaving you in the world like a fool. You did not even changed anything. The ending tone is: “Yay you won, but everything is still pretty much ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and it will get even worse”. So, for all intents and purposes, you achieved nothing and game quietly waits you to repeat the whole thing again.
In the end, this game follows an old archaic and outdated system from Titan Quest. You have to grind game 3 times through the same difficulty level just for one hero to reach the proper end game content. This game does not respect your time and treats you like a kid. If you enjoy finishing your game, this is not a game for you. If it is fine for you then go ahead and give it a try. This game is quite good underneath all of this pointless grinding. If you are looking for other games, I can recommend you Van Helsing. While it lacks certain strengths which this game has, it makes up for what this game simply is not. Being a game and not a sandbox or MMO grind simulator. Path of Exile is its own beast, but at least you are not forced to repeat same times X^3 times until you finish it. You mature through the story once with a hero and you are done. Here, grinding same quests against your will is a norm and game itself is just busy work before your hero matures after MMO like investments and only then you are permited to properly have fun experimenting with your single hero. If you wish to set up another one, it is at least 50 hour investment without using mods which gives you everything for free which also equally breaks immersion and attachment to your hero.
It is not the worst game by any means in the genre. I would say it is among industry leaders and have its own benefits. For example, it has clear skill and devotion trees which can easily be changed or modded. On the other hand it has worst kind of gear drop where you will get useless, same legendaries over and over again while never getting needed pieces from sets. On one hand it is most solidly executed ARPG on the market while on other, it still follows archaic formulas from Titan Quest which were copied from Diablo series. From games which were designed for us when we were kid and this game just refuses to realize that world had changed. That we are not kids anymore and most people, in this game’s case over 90% of all owners will never play this game second time after completing it. Yet it forced simply idiotic design choices which ruins the entire game. It is a good game, but truth must be told. As developers advertise, this is game which old ARPG fans ever wanted and take this advertisment as complete truth. It is everything what old school gamers want. Archaic design. Elitist, toxic and highly authoritarian, defensive communities. Massive time investments required until game gets properly good. Yet, it is also the best product in the market when it comes to what they are selling here and while I do not agree with what they are done with their game, I will keep playing it regardless due to game’s quality.
Now, I had played excessively veteran mode and I will give feedback only on “new players” experience. Which might involve a lot of gameplay, roughly around 50 hours. I also had experienced expansion content and DLC.
Game itself is quite bad. Mobs tend to be too easy. Bosses are also insultingly easy. Yet, some of them, almost at random are way too strong. Difficulty spikes across the board are a complete mess. You will breeze through final bosses and content only to get far more difficult optional content. It is a game where you can be insta shotted out of nowhere by random boss despite having resistances and your protection levels high.
Another issue is gear. Gear in this game sucks and sucks a lot. It is partly because you are not supposed to get any decent gear. It is all random and if RNG hates you, well tough luck. I hope you like seeing yourself getting weaker and weaker as game progresses for no fault of your own. In addition, as gear being random, it heavily favors more mainstream classes. So forget about making that unique hero which you always wanted, because you are on purpose handicapping yourself heavily. Game has a heavy preferance on certain type of builds and your uniqueness is a flaw which game and this community will brutally punish and oppress. Furthermore, most of the gear which is ought to help you level up, faction gear is locked behind reputation. This means that when gear might be potentially useful, it is locked. Even that is a big IF, because this is a typical old school ARPG where merchants sell just pure crap and thus their sold gear is more often than not just crap. It got so bad that my 50 level blues and legendaries still soundly beat 70-76 level greens, so you can imagine just how bad gearing is in this game.
Now, this game will not allow you to have fun. All the fun things are locked. Nemesis spawns, decent mobs. All locked until you can “prove” that you are worthy. This results in quite bland first playthrough without a decent challenge. Yet, wait. Game has an old classic trick up its sleeve. Expansion is raised way up in difficulty than previous content. Which means, if RNG does not give resistances which are region locked (you are likely to get certain gear in certain regions) then it means you are ♥♥♥♥ out of luck. You are not given essential tools to tackle new mobs which at this point all attack you with flashy elemental attacks of every kind. It is kind of cheap difficulty spike which is hard only because you did not passed an arbitrary gear check.
Then it is progression. You do not deserve any! You cannot complete major devotion objectives, because you are not given enough points. All the most shiny things will be out of your reach if you are anything less than directly aiming for late game goal, ignoring all the highly useful stuff early and in mid chart. Furthermore, progression is slowish. Game for some reason reduces skill point progression from 3 to 2 at level 50 which results in stagnation of your build. Game requires you to invest heavily into single abilities to be most competitive, but if you will do so, you will be faced with very shallow pool of abilities to grind yourself through the game. All in all, you won’t be allowed to have fun in your first playthrough, because “you did not earned it”.
Storytelling is just awful. Don’t get me wrong, story is great in this game, but it is told in awful manner. I hope you love to read random notes as you go, breaking flow of the game and providing small amounts of mostly pointless information about the world. Voice acting is curiously spread paper thin among random NPC, so I hope you love reading a lot of bubble text. Story itself is as predictable as it can get. There are no twists, nothing. You are the God. NPCs are useless. They tell you to own stuff and you do that. You win, everyone is happy and give you hero’s welcome! Except this game does not. Game has absolutely no cutscenes, no closure. Final boss is a joke and easier than some of random content you will find in this game. You will finish this game, you will get a single chat box congratulating for turning in quest and quest line just ends, leaving you in the world like a fool. You did not even changed anything. The ending tone is: “Yay you won, but everything is still pretty much ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and it will get even worse”. So, for all intents and purposes, you achieved nothing and game quietly waits you to repeat the whole thing again.
In the end, this game follows an old archaic and outdated system from Titan Quest. You have to grind game 3 times through the same difficulty level just for one hero to reach the proper end game content. This game does not respect your time and treats you like a kid. If you enjoy finishing your game, this is not a game for you. If it is fine for you then go ahead and give it a try. This game is quite good underneath all of this pointless grinding. If you are looking for other games, I can recommend you Van Helsing. While it lacks certain strengths which this game has, it makes up for what this game simply is not. Being a game and not a sandbox or MMO grind simulator. Path of Exile is its own beast, but at least you are not forced to repeat same times X^3 times until you finish it. You mature through the story once with a hero and you are done. Here, grinding same quests against your will is a norm and game itself is just busy work before your hero matures after MMO like investments and only then you are permited to properly have fun experimenting with your single hero. If you wish to set up another one, it is at least 50 hour investment without using mods which gives you everything for free which also equally breaks immersion and attachment to your hero.
It is not the worst game by any means in the genre. I would say it is among industry leaders and have its own benefits. For example, it has clear skill and devotion trees which can easily be changed or modded. On the other hand it has worst kind of gear drop where you will get useless, same legendaries over and over again while never getting needed pieces from sets. On one hand it is most solidly executed ARPG on the market while on other, it still follows archaic formulas from Titan Quest which were copied from Diablo series. From games which were designed for us when we were kid and this game just refuses to realize that world had changed. That we are not kids anymore and most people, in this game’s case over 90% of all owners will never play this game second time after completing it. Yet it forced simply idiotic design choices which ruins the entire game. It is a good game, but truth must be told. As developers advertise, this is game which old ARPG fans ever wanted and take this advertisment as complete truth. It is everything what old school gamers want. Archaic design. Elitist, toxic and highly authoritarian, defensive communities. Massive time investments required until game gets properly good. Yet, it is also the best product in the market when it comes to what they are selling here and while I do not agree with what they are done with their game, I will keep playing it regardless due to game’s quality.