I find this game so god damn frustrating. It feel totally elietist at every stage and just kicks you in the balls every chance it gets. This game seems to be designed around the player already knowing all the slimy tactics required in D&D. If you are a new player like me who never played D&D in the past it's basically saying "Go play something else you f*cking peasant.". I'll give you an example, I am playing on the easiest difficulty and yet I die in pretty much every encounter. What is the god damn point in that? I would say I just need to get better but that clearly isn't it. I just had an encounter where a "mysterious person" comes out of a trap door. They immediately throw a poison bomb and a molotov before your party has even had a chance to move. That removed about 3/4 of the health of every single player in my party......on the EASIEST difficulty?!?! Really? 3/4 of everyone's health instantly? So basically if I had played on the hardest difficulty every person would have died instantly? Is that what you are saying? Total BS. Then you've got the hideous dialogue. Which sounds like a jumped up school play. Every character has a painfully slow and overacted accent. Everything takes five times longer to say than it needs to and I switch off and get bored of everything they are saying. The mission design is pretty terrible as well. With there being almost no feedback from the game about what is happening. Missions will just hit dead ends for absolutely no reason and the game will not tell you. I wandered around town for HOURS wondering why the mission wasn't progressing only for me to find out that actually I had done everything correctly and there was nothing more to do!!! Thanks for wasting my life! All I want to do is explore and learn the mechanics of this game (without a walkthrough!) but you need to already know what the mechanics are to enjoy it. You need to know what's OP and which items to spam. Then you might survive basic encounter.
As the title says I have an odd relationship with ARPGs. This can be summarised as, I enjoy them but I don't really care about loot. You're probably thinking that is stupid. ARPGs are all about the loot. Sorry but I just think grinding loot for the sake of a pointless stat in a game is a lesson in futility. No one gives a crap what your DPS is. You can play this game for 1000 hours if you want to but you won't have anything to show for it except your age. Your stats and that fancy armour your character is wearing is a collection of binary data and nothing more. Loot for me, is the thing you collect on your way to a boss, or the end of a story. That is where this game falls down for me. There is no story. Unless you count fetch quests and your character getting possessed without a single attempt at explanation. One dimensional characters you find at random in the world who will throw their overbaring burdons on you depsite not knowing anything about you. There is no presence here to keep me going. Nothing keeping me coming back. Sure, if you are the sort of person who's character stats and ability builds are the number one priority you might get some enjoyment but for me that stuff is secondary and that stuff is very boring. I'll give you an example. Diablo III might have a lot of things wrong with it but going on an epic adventure to destroy a massive Demon is interesting. As are the characters. As are the minor bosses. Yet even in Diablo 3, when the story was done I was done. The combat was satisfying but there wasn't enough to keep me there. Grim Dawn is Diablo 3, with a better skill system and none of the story/character and that is a deal breaker for me.
This game looks stunning but nothing else about it particularly shines. The puzzles in the game are basic line games. You draw lines in a maze like diagram where you have a start point and an end point. These open doors and routes around an island for you to explore. Sounds simple enough and it is for the most part but the game goes out of its way to make every iteration of these puzzles frustrating. Like the idea by itself wasn't versatile enough to give variety so they decided to break their own rules to make them more interesting. They failed. The puzzles were not more interesting they were simply frustrating. The open world in this game is a bad idea as well. It wouldn't be so bad but there is NOTHING indicative of where you might need to go next. There are a variety of puzzle tiers. You can't unlock some puzzles until you've been taught the basic premise of that puzzle. The issue is you find high tier puzzles as soon as you leave the first tutorial area. At first it was fine but I wandered off in a particularly direction and the path split into two routes. So I decided to take the right path. This then slit into another two paths, so I took the stairs leading into a castle like building. Got to the bottom of these and then ANOTHER split in the road. Before I knew it I was a LONG way from the starting area and totally and utterly lost. They can give you a nudge in the right direction without it being hand holding. I don't want a map marker or GPS I just want some indication of which of the seven billion routes I should be taking!!!!! I just started getting frustrated by it. The convoluted island layout the BS puzzles where half of the board is invisible or smeared across a shadow. Then you also have the pretentious audio logs.... In the end I didn't give a rats *** about this island or the people turned to statues around it. The ending would have to be AMAZING to get over the frustration of getting there. I just know it won't be though.
