Recent reviews by DaPala

At the current state of the game I cannot recommend this. Don't get me wrong, it is a really well made game. However the decisions they made on many corners are just mindbogglingly anti-player. They wanted things to be slow. They wanted things to be tedious. They wanted you to feel like you are not the main character in the novel. They wanted you to feel like the random npc that gets executed in the intro. This game was made for the 14 people that played ruthless in PoE. PoE2 is the realization of the vision they had for PoE that everyone rejected time and time again because it is simply not fun for 99% of players.
Then they took all of these failed ideas over the last years, put them together and made them even less fun.
Playing PoE2 feels like working a job for minimum wage, if the GGG minimum wage would be $1.25.
If they continue with this vision and do not give players what they want, the game will not be successful in the long run, even more if this is supposed to be live service - nobody will ever want to replay the campaign in this way every couple months.

I do not think I need to elaborate on the issues with denuvo, only one save that you can brick, no restarting and the microtransactions.
Now to the meat of the matter: The performance is atrocious, as are the controls with keyboard and mouse; you immediately recognize that they did not spend more than 30 seconds on adapting this from consoles.
I do recognize that a lot of the design decisions want to go towards a more "oldschool hardcore" experience with the game, which in theory is a valid idea - in practice it is mostly just very tedious, like ridiculous weight or stamina limitations. This is the single player version of an mmo that tries to "waste" your time. I want to play and enjoy the game, but often your enthusiasm is just slowed or brought to a complete stop until you just quit the game. Its the game version of real life: "I want to play the game, but in order to play it for 2 hours I have to go to work for 8 hours first".
On top of that, the combat just does not feel that good to me.

Monster Hunter meets Anime. Really good combat, let's see where they go with this game, as so far this is a deviation from the previous games' gacha-formula.

Amazing ARPG - and the server problems that lead to a huge influx of bad reviews have mostly been fixed.

I am really torn about this, but I have to edit my review to a negative one. The game is incredibly fun - if it works - which it does not around half of the time.
And I am not speaking about their broken physics engine where you shoot a small bug and somehow its corpse gets propelled at you at mach 5 and oneshots you.
I am talking about the frequent crashes, endless loading screens, instantly being returned to your ship at the end of a 40 minute mission for some reason, of being kicked when the extraction shuttle lands, of being teamkilled while being inside the extraction shuttle. Around 30% of missions have some bug or similar occuring that leads to you completely missing any and all rewards and operations progress.
This has been going on for a long time, and its not only getting old, it is getting worse instead of better.

Edit: Somehow it is getting even worse, I crash or disconnect in around 70% of missions now...

The game is amazing, but Amazon royally screwed the pooch with this one. It is completely unplayable in Europe for a week now. The only time you are able to play is between 2am and 11am in the morning, otherwise no post-leveling content is working. And that assumes you get through the queue or the servers are not down.
And from the lack of communication the only solution to this is for the game to die, so the server can handle the remaining players.
So no, I cannot recommend this game, even if it is technically good - you can just never play it.

edit: this game has improved a lot and most, if not all, of the bugs I encountered are gone!

I gave this game a couple of months to improve - sadly many gamebreaking bugs still exist that just completely block your progress in the mainstory or some side quests. You either have to reload a much earlier save or start anew. And if you have started anew for a couple of times becuse of a bug or another occuring everytime...well let's say it doesn't go over well.
I'm pretty sure it would be one of my favorite games of 2018 if I could actually play it from start to finish - like this however I can't even bring myself to finish it.