Recent reviews by Exiym

A mixed bag with mostly positives, weighed down by a few kinks and questionable design decisions which will hopefully be alleviated as early access goes on. Writing this review at ~200 hours game time. Before the 0.1.1 patch changes were revealed I wanted a "Mixed" review button but I can solidly say now this is a recommend.

The Good:
- Path of Exile, with a lot of the fat trimmed. A huge reason I stopped playing PoE 1 was because there were simply too many systems. The game required you to learn and pick up 20-30 different league mechanics to understand what's going on, and saying this as someone who played multiple leagues over the years, it just got to be too much. This is the crown jewel ARPG, the golden core, massively streamlined.
- Environment and boss designs are incredible. Attacks feel telegraphed and weighty. When I die to a unique boss, it feels like my fault.
- Character attack & spell VFX look and feel great to use.
- Gearing is fun, economy of items is fun. I enjoy trading though I know this is an unpopular opinion.
- Zooming through maps listening to edm blasting entire packs of mobs never gets old.
- It's hard. Really hard. Challenges you to play better, and to activate some neurons with respect to eeking out power from gear while maintaining enough defenses. This is where it's at.
- The future addition of better aspects of crafting will undoubtedly elevate the game even further.
- Massive improvements to the stability of netcode over PoE 1, desync is a thing of the past. Solo instances are now game simulations that can be paused. It's hard to overstate just HOW MUCH the netcode has improved. It's night and day.

The Meh:
- I've seen a single citadel in 200 hours (I can clear T18 maps with ease, with a level 83 and level 93, so it's not a question of efficiency) Though this is getting patched today (0.1.1)
- It feels like you have to be a little masochistic to power through multiple deaths, and there is a lag on the reward, but you DO get rewarded eventually for sticking things out.
- Random nature of drops means huge dry streaks for items or currency or sudden massive windfalls of excess cash.
- Duping and currency inflation has kind of destroyed the EA server economy.

The Ugly:
- 'Adversarial' game design can and does go too far.
- Conflicting vision between the slowed down, 'souls-like' action of the campaign and the frenetic pace of the endgame.
- Dying to a rare with 500 modifiers feels like ♥♥♥♥. Oh, I wasn't able to mouse over the one of 5000 enemies to see that it had one of 5 or so deadly modifiers, from a pool of 100? You can't read 'explodes corpses' at light speed and make a split second decision? RIP your map. There should be some visual indicator that a rare is deadly, or even that a rare is a rare! It's hard to tell!
- Dying to ground explosions that you can't even see sucks (hopefully being fixed today with the 0.1.1 patch).
- Losing your map (1 portal) and 10% exp is extremely unforgiving. PoE 1 had 6 portals. I suspect they will eventually revert this change, but even 2 or 3 portals would be fine. ♥♥♥♥ happens.
- Rare modifiers can RNG into completely unkillable combinations sometimes. Mana Siphon aura so you can't cast any abilities? Sure, that's fine. Now give it proximal tangibility so you're forced to walk into the mana siphon to deal any damage to enemy and suddenly it's complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. It's not fair or rewarding.
- The uniques are either overpowered or they ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ suck. There's no in between and no way to sugar coat it. It worries me about the future when they say we'll add 20 flat ES to an item and this is the 'buff'. No, I'm sorry GGG, we don't need 400 of 500 uniques to be 'levelling' uniques with flat values under triple digits. If you strip away the 'unique' effects, which are 90% of the time worthless, you're left with an item that's worse than a vendor rare. Something is very wrong here. I should be excited when I get a unique drop. Every single time (except when I've gotten HoWa drops at Xesht) it's a massive disappointment.

Most of my irks are around dying, so I'll just put this final blurb. I don't mind dying. It's expected, many times. But what I can't forgive, is not being able to learn from the death. Sometimes in PoE 2, you just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ die, and it's impossible to tell WHY. The game DESPERATELY needs something like a death recap from league of legends. I DON'T MIND taking a step back. Re-thinking my build. Re-thinking my gear. Re-thinking my playstyle! Going slower. But if I don't know if it was physical damage, chaos damage, what type of elemental damage, how much, a certain modifier, etc.. If I can't make an actionable response, or figure out the correct one, I just want to ALT+F4 the game. And there have been quite a few times where a death makes me want to ALT+F4.

I know I've written a lot of words in the 'complaint' department but they are really just thorns in the side of a stellar experience. There's more meat and potatoes here than in 99% of early access titles and that's not an exaggeration. I can tell this game will provide countless more hours of fun over the next years. My only real concern for the longevity of the game is if they can prevent the feature creep & bloat that turned me off of PoE 1.

good game but short. Would have liked a second full prestige system or something. Or a few more interwoven systems of gameplay like cookie clicker to really prolong the gameplay. Some of the upgrades like don't lose relic levels and don't lose upgrades are very OP, more so because I unlocked them at a point early enough where I actually would have been fine to keep resetting over and over. Regardless, what's there is fun.

technically impressive procedural generation and seamless planet entry, a half-decent gathering & crafting system, a decent 1-playthrough story and that's about where the positives end. Even if you want to disregard the fact that years ago they flat out lied to players about having multiplayer, the story has almost never gotten an update, and the planets somehow still feel flat and boring. They keep updating the game but every time I boot it up it's still boring. So I don't really know what they're doing and why people are singing their praises. I guess if you love base building. Currently 60% off ($24, Nov. 2024 steam sale) and I still think that's overpriced. Simply underwhelming.

Graphics: 10/10
Combat: 9/10
Story: 10/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Overall: 9/10

Exceptional game weighed down by a few gripes which you have probably heard already. Invisible walls in chapter 3, lack of a minimap, some hitbox jank, and I'll echo that. From what I've heard this is the studio's first project. So, some slack can be given and chalked up to lack of experience and feedback, let's say.

But make no mistake, the experience this game delivers is top notch. And I'm a western fan so I have no knowledge of Journey To the West, but at the end I'm glad to have my horizons expanded by the legend of this great monkey. The immersion is like no other. The awe-inspiring graphics are industry standard, surpassing even Elden Ring. The only game I've seen with better graphics was Remnant II.

Additionally, since I missed the secrets on the first playthrough (finishing the game around 40 hours) I'm going to 100% achievements which may take another 2 playthroughs and in my limited experience with NG+ so far, it's a lot shorter since you are stronger and know the correct pathway the second, third time through. But this extends the lifespan of the game possibly up to 60 hours. At $1/hour, it's worth the price. Picking it up on a sale should be a steal.

been dying for more Hades

game is too easy, progress comes too fast. my advice would be toning down the auto generators, they basically automate the entire game. I played for one night and already got to ice flasks

It's time to stop rewarding developers who treat you like a piggy bank

just buy 4090 4head

edit:

was memeing but I have a 4070 ti, paid $70 for this game and it's been like a week and it's still laggy and crashing. So tired of devs doing this, same thing happened with god of war port if you had an AMD card, waited like a month and a half for a patch. Unacceptable

Game is more heavily monetized than any EA game in existence, I know its an idle game but progress moves at a snails pace unless you swipe hard. It's moderately fun and there's a lot of features but the glacial early game pace plus the allure of getting to play the rest of the game if you just buy x number of gems is too much. Theres multiple insane p2w things in the shop like stackable permanent +100% exp for certain skills and that's just scratching the surface. Skip this one.

If you have an AMD GPU pass on this until they release a performance patch. I can play most current gen games @ 1080 60 no problem, yet even on low settings this game can't seem to get a stable 60 fps. Fluctuating between 45 and 60 fps every 3 seconds or so. Absolutely atrocious performance.