Recent reviews by Axarion

Was unable to save after playing just a few hours.

Updated Review after Dawn of the Hunt: Game somehow worse, which is impressive.

Updated Review after beating Cruel (2nd run of the campaign due to lack of content in Early Access) and trying all classes in at least Act 1, some to Act 3. (after playing PoE 1 for too many years and hours).

The current state of the game looks like it would be fun to play with lots of cool and flashy combos, but in practice it all falls apart. Overall I'm very disappointed and feeling mislead with the most recent trailers very clearly hiding a lot of these issues.

• Players move at a snails pace with massive maps and lots of backtracking with poor indicators where anything is in a zone. This is especially frustrating when every single melee enemy runs 3-5 times faster than you, really making you feel like a snail.
  
• Loot just doesn't exist, the amount of decent rares or even magic items you get that work with your build will be very low even with checking vendors. Loot has been slightly improved since then, you can actually find some decent gear now, so it is less of an issue.
  
• Deterministic crafting has been almost removed, unless you socket some drops that then give really low rolled stats with a very limited selection. This makes fixing resists a pain, even with more exalt drops than PoE 1 (your mileage of Exalt drops may vary).
  
• Normal mobs feel terrible to fight as melee, they move very fast have better movement skills than you do and if you stun them get pushed away, preventing you to do a full follow up in many cases.
  
• Wind ups on a lot of Warrior and Monk skills are comically long, while providing no damage reduction of any sort. It gets even worse considering how often bosses just port away from you mid leap/slam/vault.
  
• Having to build up combos to do flashy things like drop your bell to then have the boss just float or port away is also incredibly frustrating. The Act 3 bosses are especially bad here with how much they port around.
  
• In general the balance feels incredibly off, some zones feel absolutely overtuned, while in other zones the mobs just do nothing.
  
• I feel like enemies get to do all the cool moves while we are stuck with less interesting skills than PoE 1. If you want to slow the game down it should apply to everyone, not just the player.
  
• Some very jarring lore and design decisions especially in Act 3, the writing feels awful and the lore implications are even worse. Talk no jutsu has no place in a grimdark game.

Dodge Roll is bad and does not belong in ARPGs, that's my personal opinion here. Between all the ARPGs that have added it in the last few years it has not made any of them better. PoE 2 definitely makes more use of the dodge mechanic than most, but I still think that it invalidates a big part of building your character properly if the only effective defensive layer is pressing dodge when bossattackincoming.mp3 plays.

Overall I don't think the game is very compatible with the live service model that PoE 1 had, the campaign takes way too long as a tax to try out multiple builds every few months. Zones need massive cuts to the amount of empty space and dead ends and exp and drops need to be increased to compensate.

Overall there is a compatiblity problem between the Soulslike formula and the loot arpg genre that GGG has failed to solve so far. I almost feel like the game would be better if it was just a fixed game with no rng loot involvement at all, but that is obviously not what is planned here.

Update: Instead of fixing many of the issues that plague the game GGG has decided to nerf builds that actually work into the ground, while making respecs into working builds impossible to afford at higher level, invalidating a lot of progress if you played those builds. Early access (if your game has a store you don't count as early access in my book) or not this is not acceptable.
Recommending this even less now until they focus on the important thing: Making the core gameplay loop fun.

I need to play more to be sure, but it seems ok so far.

The time travel aspect even works irl, you start the game and suddenly it's midnight.

Long overdue, but this game is amazing. Still no mirror drop though :<