While I'm nearing the 200 hour mark, I felt playing Grim Dawn time flew by like a fresh breeze.
It's pretty hard to review a game with such style, depth and replayability when you realize 200 hours in you've only scratched the surface but here goes.

For all of you Diablo 3 widowers like myself who are still filled with the bitterness and sorrow of an average Imperial Guardsman, please, look no further. I present to you Grim Dawn. And oh boy, is it grim, grim as they come. Humanity already lost, the bad guys won. Period. The best hope you can hope for is to stay alive and live another day. The gods got pissed and launched cataclysmic assaults on each other, wiping out all puny human resistance along the way in mere days. What's left is a sad, rag tag band of survivors, you included, striving to surivive while you keep the forces of evil at bay for as long as you can. Sound familiar private? Well, the Emperor is not here to protect us, in any shape or form. And I love it.

That's basically the gist of it lorewise. We are from start to finish, inmersed in a world that is teaming with relentless hordes of unfathomable horrors. The wave of monsters will be diverse and endless; Perfect excuse though, because the replayability of this game has tremendous potential for present and future content.

Gameplay wise, you have 100 levels to reach until you hit the cap for your character. 4 different difficulties to play around with (normal, veteran, elite and ultimate), 2 expansions, 6 base masteries + 3 aditional with dlc. Also there is hardcore mode, for all you masochists who love to lose everything you've been building for your character in a few seconds of misfortune.

You can pick from the following character classes called masteries: Soldier, Demolitionist, Occulist, Nightblade, Arcanist, Shaman, Necromancer, Inquisitor and Oathkeeper. Cool sounding names, and even cooler abilities and skills. You can mix and match them, as you can make a posible of 36 combinations, choosing a second mastery at level 10. And all of the builds you can think of: pet master, swift dual wielding spellblade, ranged dual wielding pistolier, 2 handed in the face melee smasher, nuking pew pew mage, captain america shield throwing frontliner and what not. There's tons of info on interesting builds in the Grim Dawn forums, some very end-gamey for farming, leveling and efficiency, while others not so much; but ALL of them in my opinion viable and fun and interesting in some form or another, regardless of the path chosen for all content completion.

Character customization can be achieved by basically 3 means: itemization, skills/mastery mixing, and devotion allocation. Items are also endless in their combinations, with damage types to name a few: cold, acid, fire, lighting, elemental, chaos, acid, physical. The same goes for resistances, which you must look after as well. Devotion allocation is a grid of over 80 constellations, very similar to PoE grid style points, which are common for all characters. Devotions come with passives and active skill rewards for your character, being a layer on top of a layer within your build. And of course mastery/skill mixing, which I already mentioned from character classes. So, you get the picture, the possibilities for gameplay diversity are endless.

Sound is stellar. The horrors of the deep void moan and groan as expected. Swords and shields clash and clang, and spells fry, freeze, melt, corrupt, or a combination of these. Explotions send gibs flying with sweet cries of agony from fallen foes, when you ocationally hear them taunt you with "death is only the beggining" creepy dialogs as an example. Music is pretty good too, a little bit repetitive but sets the tone perfectly with sad tunes of grief and despair.

Visuals are pretty solid, best I've seen from an indie studio. I must add that Crate is constantly upgrading the visuals of this game to the day, even though the base game and 2 expansions have already been released, the base game textures also recieve the nice visual treatment they deserve. The UI is not cumbersome and very practical, with a item filter embedded which helps filter out all the trash loot from the get go, so good points to be had there as well.

So to wrap up this brief review, if I'd have to give this game a score from 1 to 10, I'd say 10 out of 10. It's that good. And I crave for more. Maybe a sequel? One last expansion before the sequel? A new small dlc with a new gameplay mode and mastery? I don't care which, I just want more. If you are an ARPG fan like myself, please, stop doing whatevever is that you doing right now to satiate that fix, and give Grim Dawn a try. You won't regret it.

Is the future for upcoming "triple-A" ARPGs looking grim for you? Do you guys not have phones? I present to you Grim Dawn, a bright and sweet rennaissance for the genre; Far, very far from grim.

The planet broke before the Guard did.