How have the mighty fallen
First of all, Grim Dawn is an undisputed classic in the ARPG genre: immensely fun gameplay, excellent looting system and a veritable cornucopia of possible builds and content, both casual and challenging. The setting, with its Lovecraftian flavors, pulls just the right strings in my heart. I have 1600+ hours in the game, tons of characters and have cleared pretty much everything the game has had to offer many times over. That said, the latest DLC and the concurrent patch of the main game feel very confusing and honestly a bit worrying designwise.
But, to start with the positives: Fangs of Asterkarn has perhaps the best sound design and ambiance heard in GD thus far. Remarkable! The new score is beautiful and unsettling where it needs to be and the voice actors are great. As mentioned in earlier reviews, the new areas and vistas are very beautiful as well, if only feeling a bit empty at times (and I just love the crunch of snow underfoot when traversing frozen mountainsides and highlands). Special kudos for aurora borealis! New enemies are well designed and feel, no pun intended, cool. Berserker mastery is a welcome addition, expanding the already vast scope of possible combinations.
However, at this moment there are a number of confounding balance issues that hinder the greatness of the main game, and furthermore, some worrying indicators about Grim Dawn's direction independent of these issues. I do believe that the former can (and probably mostly will) be fixed in upcoming patches, but I feel uncertain about the latter. By balancing issues I mean the huge difficulty spikes in early difficulties (especially in Veteran) and levels, the enormously bloated HP pools of bosses and the recurring oneshot capabilities of not only nemeses and bosses but actual trash mobs (no spoilers here, but especially all mobs throwing rocks and boulders or doing leaping charges from offscreen) throughout all difficulties (Ascendant notwithstanding). More than one of my characters (who have e.g. literally facetanked Callagadra with next to no issues and cleared all content thus far) was nuked by certain bosses and mobs while having 3k+ DA, 2.5k+ armor, 16k+ HP and resistances overcapped by around 100-160. Granted, some of these oneshot kills were due to certain telegraphed shotgun attacks, but this brings me to my biggest issue of concern.
With FoA, it seems that Crate is taking the game towards yet another Soulslike both designwise and mechanically and shoehorning most of combat to revolve around pressing the Evade button. There have always been movement skills in GD and it's clear that most of the time not everything was supposed to be facetanked, but the advent of Evade (in clear copying of PoE2 just a few months earlier) was in hindsight perhaps not a good move. But back then, the attacks you needed to dodge (basically everything while having the Sunder debuff and for example Aleksander's aether meteor) were very clearly telegraphed in spite of all that's happening on screen and slow enough. Right now, certain nuke attacks are telegraphed in a way that it's very difficult to notice them coming, given all the chaos of proccing lightshows and other whatnot happening. At least to me. I'm getting old lol. If Crate remains adamant with this direction, I hope at least that they improve the telegraphing.
I for one don't find this direction fun, and I guess that's the main thing here. Playing is supposed to be fun, and I was left feeling torn with the designed overreliance on a dodge mechanic that seems shoehorned in after a decade of game's existence. I have loved this game deeply and it feels like this is just not my Grim Dawn anymore. Your mileage may vary.
Is this helpful to you?
Yes
(57 )
No
(7 )
Report abuse