Ask yourself - what did you think of Titan Quest? Grim Dawn uses basically a system almost identical to Titan Quest, it does add new things (like a new system of passive bonuses) but the basics are still the same. The biggest difference is probably the theme, being much darker... this is both good and bad. This is an old school game. It does not simply things, does not take control from you but it is missing many new features, e.g. the feedback of using skills is terrible when compared to Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2, even attack feedback is not that good... one place when they simplified things are tooltips... which actually is bad, it means you have to go into the skills screen to make sure what each skill does, as you cannot really see that in action and the tooltips are just too general. One new thing is controller support which is... decent. So skills were not designed for it and aiming does not work well, so your mileage will vary based on your build.
The game is wonderful, challenging but giving you a lot of room to improve your tactics, the difficulty does not feel random at all. The graphic while simple are very atmospheric. My only gripe is the control scheme, the game should be perfect with the controller, unfortunately all the tutorials talk about mouse/keyboard and controller buttons which are displayed are PS controller only. I understand that maybe programming the game to recognize controller is not easy, but at least they could put a manual option to switch to Xbox one which would switch the names of buttons. Seems like a 15 minutes job and yet has not been done yet. Still, the game plays well and despite some quirks is a great old school tactical crawler.
The game itself is still great and still is rather original. That said - it is 2 years later and the game still crashes on loading battles, which makes it unplayable, it's disappointing to say the least.
This game has some issues - written in Adobe Air it does not run as fast as it could it has notorious problems with image scaling at some resolutions... but underneath it all it has a game that is impossible to put down. There are a lot of tactics you can employ, no one way to beat every map. There is a lot of upgrading to do providing you with interesting choices and allowing a creation of very specialised characters. Add to this modability and challenging difficulty and you have a game into which you can put countless hours!
