Grim Dawn

Literally best ARPG I've played, developers are still providing major updates many years after the initial release. With 1.2.0.0 version it even became more dynamic and fluid, highly recommend it (with all DLCs)!

There's a lot to like about this game. The graphics are good, I've encountered no real bugs, and I've had only one game freeze. The character creation and levelling are fun, and the choices seem almost infinite. I had a lot of fun playing it for about three weeks. Then I realized that I couldn't stand playing it for one more minute, even with my fairly powerful level 50 Sorceror. Not one more minute. The problem is that the quests send you back to the same areas over, and over, and over. Unfortunately, a lot of the time that involves being mobbed by enemies that are at such a low level that you don't even get experience points for the hassle. At a certain point, it just becomes a yawnfest. Also, the faction quests repeat themselves. No, I don't mean every ten quests or so. I mean, immdiately, as in twice in a row. And it's all pretty generic. Go to X, kill Y, gain faction points. It never really feels like much of an accomplishment. And then you have to re-enter and re-clear multi-level dungeons full of low-level, non-experience-giving monsters just to get to your quarry. This one just falls short of the mark. It's a wonderful, mindless trime-waster, but nothing to get too serious about.

This is like Titan Quest (+ Immortal Throne), only better. Well, the world looks more boring, but everything else is better. It has some nice convenience features, more stuff to do (more places, dungeons, miscellaneous stuff, and a lot of secrets!), better lore, and probably lots of stuff I can't remember right now.

Grim Dawn had the potential to be a great Diablo II clone. However, it will never reach that potential, because it is ruined by poor design decisions on the part of the devs. On the positive side, Grim Dawn features a dark & gritty & mature atmosphere like Diablo II (this contrasts with the bright, babyish, cartoony, My Little Pony-style, awful atmospheres of games like Diablo III, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, World of Warcraft, etc). Grim Dawn's gameplay is also exactly the same as Diablo II's, which means you play the game by mindlessly click-spamming your mouse buttons onto endless swarms of trash mobs. Although the gameplay is highly repetitive & stupid, it's also fun. The story in Grim Dawn is worse than Diablo II's story (which wasn't good either). Evil alien spirits have taken over the world and are converting humans into an army of the undead. That is the entirety of Grim Dawn's extremely cliched and lackluster story. Don't even bother playing this game if you want a good or original story, because you won't find it here. Now I will tell you about the poor design decisions that ruin Grim Dawn. The #1 game-ruining flaw is that the devs choose to fragment the playerbase in two ways. One, they refuse/can't be bothered to implement crossplay between GOG and Steam. As a result, GOG users have almost nobody else to play multiplayer with, since the GOG userbase is very small. They sell this as a multiplayer game, but the lack of crossplay gimps the GOG version by effectively forcing GOG players to play singleplayer only. The devs could easily fix this problem by implementing crossplay, yet they won't. Two, the devs prevent owners of the expansion pack from playing with vanilla players. Thus, the already-tiny playerbase on GOG is further fragmented. The devs could easily fix this problem too, by patching the vanilla game so that expansion users and vanilla users can play together, but restricting vanilla users from using the expansion's features.

Disclaimer: I only played the based game in single player. I did two play throughs, one on Steam and on from GOG. On the surface Grim Dawn looks like a carbon copy of Titan Quest. While Grim Dawn is made by the same developers there are differences between the two games. First off, there is a stash for loot and there is a "Devotion" skill tree system. This devotion system lets you pick out mostly passive skills. Second, the gameplay is faster feeling than Titan Quest and the developers decided to go with a more generic fantasy setting. Where Grim Dawn straight up copies Titan Quest is in the character progression system. This means you can make a duel class character and investing a "mastery" skill both pumps up your main stats and unlocks skills based off of a tier system. With most ARPGs, story is not particularly important as long as the gameplay loop and loot is fun and interesting. You also have to have a sense of progress and feeling of being powerful from defeating unique bosses. Needless to say, Grim Dawn's boss fights are not exciting and the loot is interesting but I never felt like I had a great set of gear. I agree with other players when they mention an inconsistent difficulty curve. Pair this odd curve with what I found to be boring environments and this game became a bit of a chore to finish. I personally felt my excitement with this game drop off at several points in the game. Once after defeating the Warden and again when you reach HomeStead. I found this game fun, but having played Titan Quest quite a bit before ever buying Grim Dawn made my experience not as fresh and fun as others perhaps. I still recommend this game to all fans of ARPGs because there is a lot of options for character builds and the loot is good. I just never felt sucked into this game because of my previous enjoyment Titan Quest and I never felt like a larger than life hero who defeated cool bosses in this game.