Recent reviews by Craton

Wait a couple yeas before revisiting this game. It's miles away from ready.

POE2 mirrors POE1 for about 80% of what exists, but does nearly every part of that worse than its predecessor. There aren't really enough differences between the two games to even justify the existence of POE2 right now. If you've seen or played Ruthless in POE1, that's a pretty fair approximation of the gameplay for POE2.

The game plays extremely slowly. Areas, especially in the campaign, are vast but empty, and player speed/mobility is extremely low. At endgame, maps get a little denser with enemies (particularly with content like Breach), but mobility never improves; the game is always a slow meandering pace.

Crafting does not exist.

Bosses have much more interesting designs than in POE1, but the lack of mobility means every fight plays the same: wait for "big attack" to start, then dodge roll in the right direction. Fights with very different bosses end up feeling very similar because you have only a single way to engage with them.

Gear acquisition sucks. Since crafting does not exist, your only items come from random items off the ground. Random items off the ground are awful 99.9% of the time. High tier gear has a better chance of being good, but doesn't appear until deep in the endgame. The gameplay loop ends up being loot an entire inventory off the ground each map of the bases you want, then tediously use low tier currency on them, dump into tab, then later 3:1 to reroll the item. It's the orb spam system from POE1 but 100x worse.

The gem system is a mess. A number of skills don't even have enough supports to fill up a 6 link. The limit of one of each support gem per character does not work with the current dearth of gems. They probably need 3-5x more supports to make it feel right. There's also this weird half measure where a handful of gems are still damage multipliers, while others are pure utility.

The passive tree is miles worse than POE1. There are way more travel nodes, especially near the starting areas, which means actually doing interesting pathing to farther parts of the tree is extremely hamstrung. The nodes on the tree are mostly pretty weak, though some notables are extremely strong. There are no masteries. There are essentially no nodes that provide ways to fix early holes in your build like attributes or resistances. You can take travel nodes going nowhere to get 5 of a single attribute, but that's about all that exists.

A solid addition to Brotato featuring many new items weapons and classes.

Notably there's a lot more support for some hybrid approaches like mixing in elemental or engineering to a build. The extra elemental weapons also make it a more viable option thanks to more non-burning options (since burning doesn't stack).

Overall the new map's enemies are harder than the base game's Crash Site, so it definitely seems catered more toward people who already had many hours sunk into the game. New players might struggle, which may be a frustrating experience. That said, there are 6 difficulty options and you can always drop to a lower option.

Overall a solid add for a pretty low price.

The two biggest issues are the UI displays info in the most frustrating ways possible and the bots (even on hard) make nonsensical plays.

You can't see a player's cards, tokens, resources, card count, etc. without first clicking on the player. When another player takes an action it steals focus back to their player, so you can't look at any players anything (including your own cards) until it comes back to your own turn because of the constantly stolen focus.

The log does not show which conditional option was taken on a card whatsoever (e.g. you can't see which player had production removed), so if you miss it in real time that's it. When you play a card that needs you to place something, the card currently being played is not shown anywhere, including the log and cards played, so it's easy to forget what token is actually being placed.

The bots consistently make poor decisions. They'll buy 6+ cards on round 1, then spend all of their money on standard projects. They especially like to place Greenery tiles on random places on the board (without any cities) in lieu of taking better actions. This frequently leads to one bots feeding points into another player skewing the scores. Bots often hoard their resources (heat/plants) and will sit on 20+ for multiple generations.

The DLC for this game costs as much as their real-life counterparts.

This is a game worth buying if you can get it on a good sale, but not for full price.

In short, this may be the buggiest fully released game I've ever played and it's been out for 2 years at this point. In my first 1.5 games I encountered at least 1 bug per session and more than 20 bugs in total: workers getting deleted on loading a save, cargo ships becoming unable to deliver resources to an event, desynced audio, a science ship being at multiple planets simultaneously, some of your farm plots staying unpowered until you turn them off and on again (no, really), to name a few.

The UI and tutorial both left a lot to be desired. I ended up having to Google quite a few seemingly basic functions to understand how to use them.

Like Frostpunk, this game is heavily story driven and as far as I've seen the things that occur do not change from one game to the next, which severely reduces replayability. Given the extensive list of unfixed bugs and time since release, it's unlikely there will ever be any other modes.

Maybe in another year this game might be worth returning to, but right now it's in a pretty poor state.



The frequency of updates has slowed considerably, numerous balance issues have gone unaddressed for patch after patch, and the game feels very stale. The most effective strategy remains forcing the same 1-2 builds per class all the way through grandmaster rank.

There's a real need for larger system changes that affect the way things are played beyond just rerolling the shop (since that's the only option players have to affect their bag). I would love for the game to reach a point where it's more about playing what shows up rather than rerolling until hitting the most consistent build(s), but that doesn't feel likely to happen.

Overall what I see in patches and hear the developers talk about just really doesn't match what I want out of this kind of game.

I can quit whenever I want to.

My brain hurts so much.

The controls are so, so, so bad. They're extremely kludgy and unresponsive in combat and it feels like you're fighting against the controls more than the enemies. Like many games that use "checkpoints" for saves they're often too few and far between requiring you to repeat a lot of tedious platforming to get back to the fighting against the controls, er enemies, where you died before.

The worlds are intentionally designed in a way that you have to revisit them several times to explore areas. Basically you get new abilities that enable different ways of movement so you'll end up going to the exact same place just to use the new ability to reach somewhere that was maybe a dozen feet away from where you were the last time. It feels like cheap world design and adds to the tedium by repeating mostly-experienced content.

It's good despite the learning curve and cumbersome UI.

This game does a great job of capturing the feel of being in a jungle. I actually get itchy IRL while playing this from walking through the dense underbrush. The story in the story mode was great.

Biggest downside would be the enormous learning curve. Other than the most basic of mechanics covered in the tutorial, you're completely on your own to figure everything out. There's nothing explaining how to get safe water, what effect plants have, which plants are actually harvestable, what different bandages do, etc. The better way to put it is you'll inevitably get injured and be clueless how to treat it, such as treating a venomous wound, a rash, a large red bump (burrowed worm), etc.

To some degree the game expects you to just wander aimlessly grabbing things and eating them. Once you do part of the effects will appear in your journal, assuming you're still alive. There are also craftable recipes you only learn by finding the crafted version of the item in the world, but if you know the recipe you can make it at any point. It's kind of an awkward mechanic.

Considering that your character is supposed to be experienced in this jungle, figuring out the basics shouldn't be such a trial and error thing. You're better off having the wiki up the whole time, since you'll spend the first 10 hours very frustrated not knowing how to handle basic things.

Once you finally learn those basics, though, the game is fun. The world is fairly interesting to explore and there's an ever-present sense of danger that's done well.