This is a complete head-scratcher. It's been around too long to not have a succesful business model, but I'm astonished at how ethical the microtransactions are in this F2P Diablo-alike.

No, no hyperbole, I'm truly astonished. I mean, it's almost hard to find the microtransactions, and they come in three flavors: Extra character slots, extra equipment tabs, and cosmetic appearances.

I don't know how many character slots PoE has, because playing one character is dozens of hours of playtime. Playing two (it's nice to have a "solo" character and a "co-op" character, which you can do without paying anything) is easily over 100 hours of playtime.

I still have enough stash tabs to organize my stuff into appropriate tabs. I might need more tabs some 200 hours into the game. Maybe?

And there's a huge amount of things to upgrade. Weapons and armor that has slots for skill gems, but also "currency" items to buy items from vendors (no gold? Yes, no gold) that also affects your items. This helps the "trash loot" and "RNG gods" problems so much. If you find an item with great slots, but not enough else, you can enchant, disenchant, renchant, add more enchantments, craft on more enchantments, etc. If you find a great item with poor numbers of slots, you can reroll slot, reroll links, etc. How do you get these items in this Free-To-Play game, you ask?

...from Grinding Gear Games, the answer is "NOT by paying money. Ever." You want those items, you find them or you trade for them. But wait, doesn't that create a third-party economy that might sell stuff out of channel? Maybe, but GGG resfuses to compromise the quality and feel of a game the depth of Diablo II to try and skim some profits.

The skill tree (web, really) is just bananas, too, in a great way. The selection of passive skills and abilities mixed with the equipment in this game encourages, again, Diablo II leves of creative character building, with a shocking amount of high-end viable oddball creations. (Just be aware of the vastly larger phase-space of useless characters you can make along the way, and assume you won't get your first character right. Really, it's okay).

The difficulty level make for a fun experience for those looking for a fun ARPG romp, but challenging theorycrafting challenges at the higher levels for hardcore players.

Best game I've played all year? Maybe. Most? Hands down.