Almost every aspect of this game fits into it's cheesy, yet spooky atmosphere. The immersion is real here and it's very fun to experience. The powers are diverse and at the start, which one you pick matters quite a bit! Late in the game, with both dlcs, you'll have unlocked most of the powers to max. At that point, you can just play around. I found the storylines, including both expansions to be great experiences. The only things that sucked are... the spawning system, which will sometimes put enemies behind you once you are far enough away from where you came in. The other part that sucks is enemies get more accurate the more you are still. Keep moving, even at point blank range and a lot of enemies will simply miss you most of the time. On the other hand, you can be 50 feet away from a simple enemy and after a few seconds, they will begin repeatedly getting headshots on you. For me this leads to a glass cannon playstyle, where all the melee range skills are completely useless! Want to put up a shield and then wack an enemy with it, only to pull out your shotgun and rail on them with it? Won't work because they don't get staggered by a massive amount of tiny rocks hitting them; unlike when you use your ranged throw power... so you immediatly get shot repeatedly in the head as soon as you drop your shield power.
As I said in the title, this game is NOT 80% CAD worth of game. It's very good, but it's very short. I bought it when it came out on Gog and it was 40$; it was worth that. It's good all around. As usual, there's some game mechanics I don't like, but sadly not many mods out for this game. If you like colourful characters, different styles of play, a large variety of weapons, exploration and seeing a few large worlds, it's worth a buy when on sale.
This is, like any other really involved RPG, a VERY long game. It is made longer by the dlcs, which add quite a bit of content. If you like to get immersed in a world of wonder and vast, moving events, this will be your thing! If you are the kind who is impatient or twitch happy, this probably won't be. I loved the exploration of the entire game and it's massive amount of lore added gravity to the entire situation. I, who usually fast forward through conversations nowadays, listened to at least half of the conversations and still speed read through the rest. The characters are colourful, the places unique, the music very nice and suited. The bad things are mostly technical: 1) Moving from PoE 1 to 2 is VERY jarring. They have changed many of the ways the mechanics work and several of those are definitely for the worse! Spellbooks are no pre-defined; you can't collect spells in them... spells are either in your found spell book or you select them as a perk. Given that collecting things, including spells is a great hobby of mine, I was rather annoyed by this! 2) Next they decided the summon statues, which were formerly once per day were now going to be a small number of uses and then self destruct. This is absolute shit! I like collecting stuff like this, so losing them after a few uses is painful; so I got a mod that changed them back to being 1 use per day. This works out perfectly as you NEED a lot of little distractions in certain battles or you are guaranteed to be overwhelmed. 3) Last major problem in the game is the devs who made the dlc bosses outright cheated. You can only cast 2 spells per combat, of each level, but some of the dlc bosses have infinite uses of their spells. It also sucks that you can only cast 2 spells per level no matter what you do, with a possibility of a 3'rd use of each by empowering your character in combat. Use empower every difficult battle; I kept forgetting to do this until all the spells were gone.
