Recent reviews by Barnek

Complex and punishing. Emphasis on complex.

The more you know about how to synergize mechanics, the better. The high learning curve will give you time to grasp its concepts. And like many already pointed out, no money is needed to go from zero to hero. But considering a specialized stash tab for currency items will save you a lot of space on the long run.
The game is being constantly updated since the beta 5 years ago. For a free to play game the devs are quite dedicated with frequent updates and they are constantly in touch with the community.

Path of Exile has strong defined pros and cons. You either like it or not, no middle point.
Go for it if you like dark fantasy rpgs in general or you just like Diablo and similar games like Grim Dawn, Titan Quest or Torchlight.

How to explain this...

Have you ever had that sudden idea out of sheer boredom to mix Pepsi with lemon juice without expecting any good outcome but it resulted to taste great?
This game gave me that feeling.

Have you ever furiously tapped the buttons of the microwave oven at Black Mesa's rest room while shouting "give me more kelvins" at the poor machine?
Me neither, and I wouldn't probably do.

Have you ever needed to put your last hope and trust a dubious and rowdy team made of Paper Mario, the spirits of the chickens in cs_italy, a furry enthusiast with a chainsaw, Picard with a M249, and a bunch of Doom guys and miniature HECU grunts dual wielding meme shotguns?
I don't even know how to reply that without getting a crash due to the max_gltextures error.

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The game mixes everything the roots of the GoldSource engine has to offer. Half Life, Blue Shift, Opposing Force, Quake, Doom, and popular mods like They Hunger, Cry of Fear, Poke646, and more than 1100 maps up to this moment made by the community since 1999.
If you already played Source counterparts like Synergy or Obsidian Conflict, it is easier to picture it.

Personal tips: due to its longevity, every now and then you can find a jokeish ambient settled by the map goals.
If you want to download packs of playermodels to "increase" your "variety" (around 4GB and more than 1300 playermodels) it is strongly recomended to take a while to look at them and delete what you don't like.
Take your time to configure the game via cvars if needed. GoldSource is 20 years old and it can't properly make use of modern hardware. It is worth to note that this game also uses GoldSource but it was greatly modified.

Recommended if you want a different approach to a classic formula but with a little twist.

When someone recommended me this game I wasn't expecting anything of this, pretty much everything caught me by surprise.
Every aspect of the game is used to explain its world. The main purpose focuses in narrating the events and it does it very well. All characters does a great job expressing their feelings and reactions, both human and virtual, at the point of making you take moral decisions later on.

The events are very well detailed through text and dialogues and knows how to press a finger on your mind.
It takes the old concept of "what if you could dump yourself into a machine" one step further and mixed between all the things going on.
Defining what means being alive and the use of moral choises are strong recurrent topics, both taken a bit different from what it is used to in science fiction in general.
Although there could be a wall of text about the existencial philosophy, it is one of those cases where it is better to just see it by yourself.

Surviving boils down to stay in dark places and not look at the monster. It takes patience in some areas and can be a bit annoying how long it takes for them to go away or how easy they detect you with the sound as soon as you bump into a pebble in the other side of the room.

And this could be just me but the game would fit perfectly without the random roaming monsters. The way it tells the story makes it feel more like a movie than a game.