Grim Dawn is one of those games that feels like it's not trying to get you to play it. It knows it's awesome and, if you want, it's got a lot of hours of fun in store for you.
I am not looking for my ARPGs to reinvent the wheel. I was obsessed with Diablo 2 and Grim Dawn has it's roots in that same bloody puddle. When you show up in the world of Grim Dawn you show up into a world thats currently ending. You're going to be meeting a small cast of charactors as humanity is on the ropes and the classes in Grim Dawn reflect this.
This is not a simple world of Mages, Clerics, Wizards, and Rangers. Magic is dangerous and it feel like each trope is reimagined. I absolutely love my storm worshipping Shaman who doesn't want anything more in life than to smash his enemies with a very large weapon that's been infused with lightning.
The most interesting part of Grim Dawn is the complexity it drops in your lap. There are a variety of ways to play any of the classes and, before too long, any character that's survives will be picking a second class! The combination of two classes opens up everything.
And then that's all blown away again by the Devotion system.
At some point this will all start to feel overwhelming and you'll just head into the world looking for doors to kick and loot to sell and hours, level, skill points, and life responsibilities just seem to disapear in the beautiful chaos of hacking and slashing.
A dozen hours later you'll be hitting some seriously hard content on your third character and that memory of feeling overwhelmed by the skills screens and devotion points has just kind of fallen away. There is very quickly a cheap option to reset any stat points and other key metrics so shifting with the challenges as they arrive is more of a pleasure than a challenge. The bumps along the way arnt brick walls, they are challenging bosses. Oh, and you can always call in back-up!
Grim Dawn is best played with friends and thats how I suggest you play it. The hours that I spend rolling crowds of enemies looking for items to complete the sets stored in my stash are well spent. That sentense could really apply to Grim Dawn or Diablo 2 and, as far as I'm concerned, thats a very good thing.
Six thumbs up.
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