Fun ARPG!

This game has some of the best ARPG elements in the market, but it is absolutely hamstringing itself with a couple extremely bad design choices.

It has the best Auction House in the market. Hands down. Laden with amazing QOL things, you'll find yourself really enjoying looking through the AH, setting up elaborate searches to really zero in on what you're looking for. And selling things on the AH is easy as well. Super smooth, fast, and efficient. If POE2 had this Auction House, they would take over the world.

It also does a pretty good job with the difficulty and the rewards for doing things. I don't feel like I'm constantly starved for currency like in POE or POE2. I'm absolutely CONSTANTLY tweaking my gear, buying new things off the AH, rerolling stats on my gear, etc. Could it be a little better especially at end game? Yes. But it's better than any other currency driven ARPG out there, except for MAYBE Last Epoch.

It controls great and looks awesome, if you like that art style.

They are always introducing new things and improving old things, so the game always feels fresh. I like to play every other season, which feels right for me.

But there are some really bad things too. For one, this game has the worst class balance of any ARPG. Hands down. And they don't seem to really care either. There have been multiple patches/seasons where certain characters are literally unplayable past very, very early end game. Meanwhile, there are a small handful of characters that are doing quintillions of damage with medium end game gear. People have been complaining about this since they nerfed all the skills back in like Season 5 or 6, but it continues to this day. If you're going to try this game out, research your potential character choices to make sure it's even possible to have success with that character.

The UI hates you, and wants you to suffer. The game used to be a freemium gatcha POS game, and the UI and currency design still shows that. There are a zillion menus that either have weird overlap, no overlap, or direct to something else other than what you're looking for. It's like how they design department stores to be mazes so that people can't get out and are more likely to spend money. They wanted you lost in the menus, confused about what kind of the 30 different currencies you were supposed to be buying. Don't get me wrong, there are still a gajillion currencies and it's a little predatory, but other than one particular thing you can buy, they are purely cosmetic and don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Now...the big divisive one. Loot pets. The game has a little pet system where you can slot in "battle pets" that just give you passive combat stats, and then "loot pets" that give you passive loot bonuses. You can only get these pets from these ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gatcha scratch-off chest things, and for the most part, you get those chests with real money. You can get some free chests from playing, doing certain challenges, etc, but like...97% of the pets you would ever get are designed to be gotten by spending real money.

The combat pets don't matter TOO much, provided you picked a good character. They help, yes, but it's more icing than anything. But those loot pets....they are so strong. They can give such an unbelievably huge boost to your drops, or to the way your rewards from particular types of activities shake out, that the difference is splitting the community and lowkey kind of killing the game in the West. Some players that are much smarter than I am did some math on this last season's loot pet and concluded that if you got that pet and got it leveled up to max level (by just throwing more money at the devs, essentially) that you could effectively double your loot. In a game that is all about loot, and that has an economy that you'll NEED to engage in in order to succeed - that's an unacceptable amount of power. And it will cost you. Hundreds to a thousand or slightly over. And that's just to get the loot pet that is designed for THIS SEASON'S mechanic. Next season will have a whole new mechanic, and thus a whole new loot pet. I don't know about you, but I'm not spending 500 dollars per season.

All in all, the game is still fantastic. I think it's the second best ARPG out there right now, second only to Last Epoch. But they are heading in a direction that is worrisome, and I'm not sure they care to change course. Time will tell.

P2W Garbage