Some may consider this premature, since I have not yet played Ultimate, but with 100 hours on the clock and a half-dozen characters played to varying lengths (mostly Veteran; one Elite), I feel I have a good enough grasp of Grim Dawn to write a review. Overall, I am happy with this game (100 hours says that already!), but I will point out areas I feel the game could be improved to be the best game it possibly can!
I will start with the superficial elements of the game. The audio is largely excellent. Good background music, useful special effects and some sections with good voice acting. The biggest issue is the lack of variety. There are very few background music tracks. What exists is top-class, but you hear the same few tracks constantly. A little more variety, with each track being limited to certain zones (eg by act, or by primary enemy type) would keep the music fresher for longer. There are some odd audio sounds at times too. For example, there is a sound effect for an enemy buff that is identical to the level-up sound in Sacred 2. That one still catches me every time! Overall, there is nothing to complain about here. The visuals are solid. Major NPCs are instantly recognisable, enemies vary between good and incredible and spell effects are fantastic. The standard mobs — the most common sight in the game — are excellent. Humans are dressed so that their allegiance is quickly identifiable, while more monstrous foes have interesting and setting-appropriate designs. The major bosses, however, are a little less exciting. They fall into the typical “giant abomination” that dominates the genre with little to make them stand out from other games. Not a major issue, but they lack the unique touch of the regular monsters. The final boss is particularly disappointing, being highly reminiscent of The Destroyer (Borderlands), a boss fight so bad the Gearbox devs apologised for it! The visual effects are suitably flashy, but the use of colour to make their damage type instantly recognisable is a great touch in a game that features such enormous variety. That said, there is not much visual difference between vitality and chaos damage types, and in the midst of battle they are hard to differentiate, but this is largely a moot point. It is not as though the player needs to react differently to different damage types, so this is more of a nice feature than a gameplay critical one. A more concerning issue is that the developers seem to be pushing the limits of the engine, which can result in severe slowdowns whenever there are too many mobs on screen. This does not happen constantly, but there are certain locations (or combinations of enemies) that can bring the game to a screaming halt. I would happily sacrifice some of the bling for smoother gameplay.
The design of the zones is perhaps the game’s greatest achievement. Each location is crafted with loving attention and designed to reward curiosity and exploration. For example, a random clock stuck in the middle of some ruins, and you can hear it ticking when near. Incredible attention to detail! The destructible environments also demonstrate the care put into these zones, though some locations can feel a little too fragile with masonry flying at the slightest nudge. The game also avoids falling into the usual tropes that dominate the genre, instead crafting locations that fit its own lore. Perhaps the only real flaw is the randomly-located barriers, that are to prevent every game from feeling identical. These often feel more annoying, and at times force the player through needlessly long routes to get to a particular location. It is hardly game breaking, but it feels like these barricades add little-to-nothing for what they take away. If they were destructible in some way (and they look like they should be) this would eliminate the issue for when players really want to pass, while still breaking up play when a player does not want to waste their time pummelling a barrier. A bigger complaint would be the ‘town’ zones. Devil’s Crossing is fine, but the lay-out of Homestead is extremely inconvenient, to the point where I just avoid it. The core design of Sorrow’s Bastion makes it too impractical too, but thankfully Fort Ikon returns to being a useful, practical ‘town’ zone. I will also make particular mention of the Chthonic Portal zones. These manage to replicate the the feeling of the original Diablo, something even Diablo II never achieved. You are dumped in the middle of a hostile area with no immediate access to the exit and no ability to make a portal, and you have to slowly explore lest you end up in a situation you cannot handle. I never thought a modern game could achieve this feeling, so I am glad to be proven wrong! There are also two special dungeons designer for higher-level play. These are a great addition to the game, but have one tedious feature. Traps just appear from nowhere, all the time. They were not so bad in the Steps of Torment, but the Bastion of Chaos was different. They were tedious! They do not add any difficulty, just slow the pace of play down. If the player could attack and destroy these traps to end their effects sooner, the problem would immediately resolve itself!
In general, I feel the flow of the game is quite smooth. The zones feel like a good size and there are rift gates frequently enough for the average player. There are a couple of sections that do not quite feel right to me, however. The Twin Falls zone -> insect cave -> three levels of Arkovia Undercity feels just a little long between rift gates on Normal/Veteran difficulty. By Elite you have the clear-speeds that this is no longer an issue, but the in-progress builds that hit this in Normal/Veteran have a long slog ahead of them. I have given up at this point on more than a couple of new characters because I just could not be bothered with how long it takes. Somewhat worse is the Broken Hills -> three levels of Steps of Torment -> Barren Highlands section, as it takes too long even in Elite difficulty. The lay-out of the Broken Hills zone is quite tedious to navigate, making it too time consuming to leave the Steps of Torment for another session, leading this leg of the game to be uncomfortably long every time I play. If there were a rift gate at the start of the Barren Highlands, or the path from the Broken Hills rift gate to the Steps of Torment less annoying to navigate, I would find this section a lot smoother. Finally, the farmlands west of Homestead are very long and boring. The rift gate half-way is in a poorly situated location (too early and an unacceptable risk of a gate-ambush), making it a very poor place to take a break, but there is still quite a long slog ahead. The Royal Hive makes this section particularly bad, as it is very long, very dull and the final boss of it is probably the most boring fight in the entire game. It takes an excruciating long time to get through the first stage of the boss, but there is also zero challenge in that time. You just hit a meat wall with a toothpick until you finally break through. I absolutely hate this section of the game!
The user interface is serviceable, but could use some work. The basics are fine: you can clearly see your health and energy, you know what your attacks and cooldowns are, etc. It is the finer details that need work. Perhaps the biggest flaw is the lack of feedback on buffs/debuffs. The game usually does not tell you what is happening (and the times it does you need to mouse-over a tiny icon, mid-battle, that often fails to explain anything), the website and the wiki are silent too. In the end I decided I just that it did not matter! The game is providing you feedback on “something,” but without any way of knowing what that “something” is the feedback becomes meaningless. Targeting is sometimes an issue too — one that simply should not exist! In certain scenarios, you may be fighting alongside allies, but the game targets allies and enemies the same. There is no practical reason to target allies with your offensive skills, so the interface should not do this. Similarly, after you kill a few Hero spawns, the area can become littered with loot. The game prioritises selecting loot over targeting hostiles, making it a little tedious to continue the fight. You can turn off loot display, but it is better to have it on 90% of the time; it would be more convenient if the game were just a little smarter in target priority.
The core gameplay is excellent. I would definitely consider this the best Diabloesque in many, many years. Unlike Torchlight 2, Grim Dawn does not merely rehash old ideas: it innovates and refines. Unlike Path of Exile, Grim Dawn has a more consistent and focused design direction, more responsive gameplay, better visuals, better interface. Unlike Diablo III, Grim Dawn allows the player to craft a character, rather than merely follow a pre-ordained path. Unlike both Diablo III and Path of Exile, Grim Dawn has a loot system that is both functional and exciting. For me, Diablo and Diablo II are so steeped in nostalgia that they cannot be fairly compared with anything else. My next most favoured Diabloesque is Sacred 2: I consider Grim Dawn a worthy rival. Both games have very similar strengths and weaknesses. At present, I would still consider Sacred 2 ahead of Grim Dawn, but it had countless patches and an expansion, while Grim Dawn is still very new. In time, I do believe Grim Dawn has the potential to take its place. Even as-is, I would consider this is one of the best games in the genre.
The general approach taken to mobs in Grim Dawn is excellent. Huge numbers of canon fodder to chew up with your AoEs, with nasty individuals mixed among them. They could be a shield-bearer who takes a hammering, a charger, a brute, some nasty ranged fighters, or a support caster. Outside very basic groups, I have not encountered a boring fight. AoE and Crowd Control are rewarded, but the player also needs to be conscious of target priority and take an intelligent approach to dealing with groups. Add in the fairly frequent Hero spawns and there is plenty to keep you on your feet. It is probably also worth mentioning that the different factions of the game have distinct approaches to combat. This is another really nice touch that adds a lot to the game’s atmosphere. Not everything is perfect, however. The devs have over-used mobs that explode/leave dangerous ground on death, so instead of it keeping players on their toes it merely becomes expected and slows the pace of the game down. Perhaps the silliest thing is the way the mob AI reacts to the player. You can aggro mobs on the other side of the wall, who will run through several rooms to eventually make their way to you. They should not know you are there — you should not know THEY are there — let alone act in this way. Ranged mobs are even dumber, as they will attack the wall between you. Not a game-breaking issue, but a very silly one. More tedious is in regard to playing a ranged character. Many terrain features and invisible walls can block your projectiles, but mob projectiles have different properties and can often bypass these barriers. Sometimes neither of you can attack the other, and sometimes you can attack and their projectiles are ineffective. Similarly, ranged mobs have longer range than the player, able to attack you without fear of retaliation (or even fear of being seen, as they are off the screen!). These are, again, not game-breaking issues, but the inconsistency is annoying and certain locations are so dense with projectile-blocking features as to make play tedious. Somewhat more game breaking is that certain spell effects (eg Sky Shard) can be blocked by trees and walls, completely invalidating them in certain sections of the game. The player’s build should not be penalised in ways like this, especially in a game where you do not have the skill points for a large number of redundant attacks.
Another area where mobs could be improved is in the ambushes (eg zombies coming from the ground, birds flying down). The basic concept is great, but it seems a little buggy. On more than a few occasions, my ranged character has inadvertently scored hits on these mobs before they actually appeared, killing them before the ambush happens. If that does not happen, they often do not appear until I had passed the ambush point and they are no longer on screen, leaving me to only discover them if I come back along that path later. They definitely should not appear around the player (that would be unfair on squishier caster builds), but perhaps it would be better if they appeared just before the player reaches them, rather than long after you have passed. On occasion, when there is an ambush near one of those semi-random barricades that block the paths on maps, half the ambushing mobs appear on the wrong side of the barricade, usually leaving them completely incapable of joining the fight. This makes things easier for the player, but seems pretty stupid. On a happier note, I am thrilled by the approach Grim Dawn takes with Hero spawns. Compared to Diablo II, the challenges are at least as high — without those situations where you randomly roll an unbeatable Champion — and the result manages to be more rewarding. I think this would be the most enjoyable implementation of this feature I have seen in the genre.
The loot, one of the core features of the genre, is above-average. Drop rates are definitely not a problem — if anything, I feel I get Epics and Legendaries too often! — and there are a lot of interesting properties that can exist on equipment. Sadly, due to the huge number of damage types in the game, I usually end up doing the same thing as every other game in the genre: if the item does not contain multiple resistances, it is automatically trash. Compared to games like Diablo III, Grim Dawn does a lot to alleviate the need for “perfect” gear, but resistances still trump cool effects, no matter how cool that effect may be. For all the Epics/Legendaries I am swimming in, very few of them have been of interest. In fact, despite the high drop-rate of Epic/Legendary items, the high number of possible builds the designers need to support results in the overwhelming majority of items being utterly useless to me, so I often play for a day and walk away without a single usable item. Skill boni for eight different Masteries (each of which you only use a minority of skills for) and boni for 9(?) different damage types (most of which having a separate modifier for DoT damage) mean that finding an item that actually has stats useful for you, while also meeting fundamental requirements (eg resistances) is exceedingly rare. The blacksmith currently does nothing to alleviate this issue either. Again, due to the huge number of builds they need to support, after 100 hours I have still found found any blueprints that support the builds I am running, leaving the Blacksmith largely useless to me. I still need blueprints for Empowered Relics so I can meet the requirements for the Transcendent Relics I have unlocked. There are also certain sections where the base items can be problematic. Due to mobs in Grim Dawn dropping the gear they use, certain groups have massive biases towards specific items. When I face Chthonic forces or the Order of Death’s Vigil, I end up with an inventory full of wands and caster off-hands. Completely worthless if I am playing a weapon-using build! Perhaps the mobs need to be mixed up more so that all players are equally likely to find useful gear (eg Chthonic Knight, Death’s Vigil Sniper, etc), rather than huge sections of the game proving to be completely useless for certain builds (‘weapon and armour using guy’ is hardly a niche build!).
Another key feature of the genre is building a character. Grim Dawn has inherited the basic system from Titan Quest, but changes things enough that you have to re-evaluate what you thought you knew about character building. The Masteries of Grim Dawn follow perfectly sensible themes, but they are not the generic themes new players may expect. Once you get over that ‘culture shock’ and understand the logic things are fine, but it does put an unexpected bump in the usual learning curve. I would again compare Grim Dawn with Sacred: the system is initially obtuse and takes some learning, but once you understand it everything falls together perfectly. Devotions are a fascinating innovation that, in my opinion, is one of the greatest features in Grim Dawn. It adds an interesting and effective layer of character development, but it also helps alleviate some of the equipment issues that plague games like Diablo III. However, as good as devotions are for the game, the interface for them is terrible. The information overload is not what a new player is going to want to see, and even as a somewhat experienced player I still find it easier to just go to the wiki and plan my points allocations outside the game. There is no clear logic to where the player will find things they want, nor any clear indication to how a player will progress from one constellation to the next. In terms of interface design, I would suggest this screen fails every criteria of good design. Sure, it is pretty, but completely non-intuitive and exceedingly user-unfriendly. Given the basic concept of the devotion constellations, however, I have no idea how one would go about making a better interface. It would take a design genius to solve the problem, so I suspect this will remain a core issue with the game that players either adapt to or give up on.
Attributes are a controversial aspect in the genre. When games do not let players invest in them, the players complain about the lack of customisation. The trouble is, when players can invest there tends to be enormous balance issues that they complain about instead. They are a lose-lose situation for developers. Grim Dawn clearly has a problem here! Investing in Masteries handles the lions share, and this is good: it makes sense and likely makes balance a lot easier for the developers. The one point per level, however, is pretty poor. No matter the build, no matter the game mode, Physique is always the best choice. In addition, the optimal way to play the game is to sit on a big bunch of points on the off-chance you need them for item requirements. Clearly, this feature is nearly irrelevant! The devs could have just left all attribute points in Masteries and rebalanced the numbers around this. However, the players would have cried foul and that results in us having this illusion of choice. This is another area that I am not sure could be resolved through any amount of rebalancing. It is not a game-breaking issue, however, so I hope the developers do not waste their time trying to untie this Gordian Knot.
The fundamental archetypes — melee, ranged and caster — are all easily represented in their most common forms, but all could use improvement. Melee is clearly disadvantaged: not due to a simple balance issue, but due to core game design. All builds use the same stats, the same types of gear and, often, the very same skills. As such, melee classes have no advantages to balance out having to stand toe-to-toe and take more hits: they are not innately sturdier, nor deal additional damage to balance the books. In fact, ranged builds often have more innate survivability (hit less often) and the ability to do more damage (bigger AoEs). Melee is perfectly viable, but clearly disadvantaged! Between Nightblade, Shaman and Soldier, all basic melee archetypes are easily crafted, so there are definitely no major gaps or oversights in the skill options here. Ranged weapon users just feel weird. Currently, there are no masteries that properly support the archetype, even though many skills can be used for both melee and ranged weapons. Frankly, a rifle user in Grim Dawn feels more like playing a typical caster (Sorcerer, Sorceress, High Elf) than the classic ranged weapon user (eg Rogue, Amazon, Wood Elf). They are viable, they are fun, but they definitely do not feel ‘right’. I can only hope a future Mastery may be added that provides ‘proper’ skills for this archetype. Casters, as in all games, have a slow start: by the nature of the beast, they need the most skill points to get going. Grim Dawn could do a little to smooth this curve. For example, the Diablo games had staves that provided basic, reliable spells for low-level characters. Once a caster gets going they are fine, but those early levels could use a little smoothing. While not as severe as ranged weapon builds, I feel casters are also somewhat lacking in options and could use another Mastery or two to add more synergies and enhance the pool of possible builds.
Grim Dawn includes factions, similar to but significantly more detailed than the factions in Sacred 2. This adds a lot to the feeling of being in a living world and grants great rewards for simply playing the game a lot! Enemy factions will send more mobs at you as they come to hate you more, while friendly factions will offer more to assist you. The basic concept is fantastic, but again could use a little tweaking. When I first moved up a tier on an enemy faction, I had no idea what that meant. I tried Google, but could not get an answer. The wiki and the website were uninformative. I asked on the forum and received contradictory replies from other players! A little tutorial message explaining exactly what is happening would be nice. Allied factions can offer you faction-unique equipment, but the lower-tier options seem quite useless. By the time you unlock them, they are already obsolete. What is the point of including options that are never going to be useful to anyone? There also seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the Black Legion too: every other faction is increasing as 2-3 times the rate of them. Everyone else gets a boost by simply killing mobs in standard play, while the Legion are entirely quest-based. There definitely needs to be a tweak here. It would make a lot of sense if they were favourable to you killing Aetherials or Riftspawn. Similar, albeit nowhere near as bad, the only hated faction of Devil’s Crossing is one only present for a very small section of the game, so they are a little slower to develop than the other friendly factions. It would make a lot of sense if killing Beastkin also boosted your reputation for them, from both a lore and mechanical perspective.
Overwhelmingly, Grim Dawn is a good game. It is far better than its peers in recent years, managing to get the fundamental formula right while also successfully innovating in interesting ways. There are some balance issues, there are some gameplay issues, and there are definitely a lot of bugs (like that annoying freeze on exit bug), but these are not crippling issues and they can be addressed by future patches, or even an expansion(!). The game is flawed and not yet one I could see myself investing 500 hours into, but even Diablo II was terrible on release. It took 18 months to turn it from a barely adequate sequel into the legend that all others are compared to. Grim Dawn is still in the very early days and I am confident it can also undergo a similar transformation to become the brilliant game it deserves to be.