Grim Dawn - Ashes of Malmouth

#1 devs in my book. There are no others.

Necromant + Grim Dawn Gameplay => 5 Stars!

DCL without it Grim Dawn seems lack many thing i.e. relic blueprints, some new enemies and higher lvl cap...

Don't get me wrong the new area's look nice; the Necromancer has enough mooks (with a few items and being a shaman you should be able to get 20+ minions); but it still hasn't got a lot of Q.o.L improvements like a map overlay and ambiguous info tooltips. [It still has problems with short summon time outs] What I am getting at is it adds a bit of content, but it doesn't necessarily improve the game; which is fine if you are in love with the base game. Just don't go in expecting the balance to be different or every monster not to be packing a DoT AoE of several types like they've thrown the kitchen sink to have them keep relevant as a threat. You'll still be tripping over items while trying to shoot, having shots blocked by poor hitboxes, all the detail gone into weapons rather than decent looking armor or heaven forbid simple actions (like varying attacking), glaring compromises to classes that try to be jack of all trades and a return to the slow grind pace of the main campaign. That being said there are worse buys out there and worse 'expansions' to games on GOG.

Unfortunately, although Grim Dawn attempts to meet standards set by predecessors in it's genre, it fails to achieve a reasonable difficulty curve. Instead of having various mechanisms within the game by which players can learn to overcome various hurdles, the game eschews tactical planning and strategy in favor of 'gotcha', one-shot death, insta-gib rolls of the dice, whereby your character is instantaneously exploded in a manner that precludes any reaction response. This moves the genre of games away from a kind of 'adventure, exploration, looting hack and slash' to an exercise in sadomasochism, whereby randomly your character is lost through no fault of your own and with nothing to learn from it. Just a weighted dice roll to repeat. So it is bizarrely the case that a superior game can be cobbled together using this game's engine, porting another game from a previous, earlier era when games were more finely crafted into it, and creating a better gaming experience than this original game has. I don't think that should be the case, that modern games are clearly inferior to earlier games simply because the developers have to bait their playerbases into maintaining interest through a skinnerbox comprised of massively uneven spikes in difficulty.