Grim Dawn Definitive Edition

It took me a while to get the hang of Grim Dawn, it's surreal world, the art style and all the deep gameplay mechanics. The first time playing it, I put it down again for months. But when I gave it a serious second attempt, it started to click with me. And boy did it click, the further I got in the game. There is a deep learning curve to overcome, so it is not the best ARPG for people new to the genre. But if you come from Diablo 3, Path of Exile or others, Grim Dawn has so much more to offer. The game has been supported for five years, and there is tons of content now, with insane replay value. It is finished, refined and a true classic. Don't judge it by the somewhat outdated graphics. Spend some time in this world, read the dialog and bits of lore you find, and you'll be hooked by a surprisingly dark atmosphere. The game also runs great on older systems and with Steam Proton on Linux. There are many classes to pick, you can even select a second class to create hybrids of your own imagination. The loot system is deep and extremely flexible. Enhance your loot with components you find to make it suit your build better. By unlocking and spending points in the "devotion" system (a complex system to unlock powerful passive skills), you can further customize your character and gameplay style. You can pretty much make *anything* work well in Grim Dawn, but it requires a bit of thought. This means the game is less casual than others, but in return, you can literally enjoy it for years. The pacing and balancing has become near perfect. Put some thought into your build, get your resistances high enough and make good use of components and devotion points, and you'll feel very powerful. But no matter how powerful you are against most enemies, there are always enemy heroes, bosses and later in the game nemesis encounters that require your full attention, or you'll die quickly. In short, this is one of the best aRPGs ever made and a full recommendation.

Just finished the main plot with of the last expantion and I have to say this game is one of the best diablo style RPG. I hope the devs make a sequal.

Played way too much of Diablo 3, and was left shocked in disappointment. Grim Dawn is like taking everything you could imagine despising about Diablo and fixing it into something else that transcends anything about Diablo--Crate beats Blizzard at their own game in every imaginable aspect. Grim Dawn would annihilate Diablo with a little spurt of aether ray. You will forget how wonky your character looks after the first few gunshots. I cannot describe how wonderful it is adding devotion powers to your already insane abilities...try it for yourself!

Clearly, this game has a huge fan base. I will only speak to those like me who want a game to feel more tactical and controlled, which this game doesn't feel like it is. You can't fault this game for having too much loot, -- it's the nature of the game. But each piece of equipment has what seems like a dozen different effects (not color-coded - need a mod for that), and getting a sense of what it would do for a particular build requires a long, hard stare, and switching tabs back and forth to see the effects on different damage types. Added to that the components you can mount on each piece, and any hope for control is lost. Instead, it feels like a very imprecise guess-work, and each new piece of gear feels like a burden for it. For this level of complexity, the UI needs to be much, much better than a wall of text that it currently is. Combat is fast paced -- too fast paced for my liking. It's over in a jiffy, and it's hard to know exactly what happened. Sometimes I take inexplicable amount of damage, sometimes I'm doing just fine. It's impossible to be tactical, to pause and evaluate without occluding the whole screen. Again, simply not that kind of game, but wouldn't it be nice to be given the option? The dual-class sytem is pretty cool, especially with the ability to easily respec. I've heard time and time again to refer to builds online, not to mess up too much. However, deciphering the guides is hilariously frustrating; they're choke full of terminology and abbreviations and are clearly geared toward already-experts. That said, there are websites for looking at ready-made builds at specific levels with game-like GUI which obviates the need to actually read through the guide, and that's pretty cool. I get the game is complex, but the combat not really feeling particularly satisfying, so I don't see much point getting a PhD in Grim Dawn. I'm not giving up on the game just yet; I might come back and reevaluate.