Recent reviews by leM

Great game up until the very end, as in beat every endgame boss end. PoE is a game about a loop character progression: kill monsters, get loot, use loot to come up with new ways to improve your character, kill monsters faster, get loot faster, use loot to come up with new ways to improve your charcter... PoE has clever thresholds to hold you off from progressing until you improve your character and beat certain bosses that upgrades are gated behind. This element of PoE's design turns it from just an addictive grinding loop to an addictive grinding loop with problems that you feel clever overcoming.


The problem with Path of Exile is the times where you are unable to experience those complimentary game play elements: the beginning and the end. The game is ridiculously unfriendly to new players: useless junk drops everywhere that is not filtered for you unless you know about the third party website that will have an item filter for you to start with based on your class. Archetypes are horribly unbalanced early: some skills will make the game boringly easy, some skills will have you running into a brick wall every new boss you encounter.

If you are able to tough out the incredibly steep start of the learning curve, and are able to figure out a build you enjoy and have some help from guides to set you down the right path then you are rewarded with an incredible gaming experience. A game you can play whenever you just want to turn your brain off and relax, or when you want a game that will give you something to tease your brain with. If you are into the genre I highly recommend toughing out starting out.

PoE's endgame problem occurs once the game runs out of actual challenges to gate you from progressing your character, at which point the game forces you into coin flips as the final boss to beat. Play for hours to get enough currency to have a go at crafting one of your remaining upgrades, only to miss your 50/50 and lose out on hours of gaming progress.

Great game, don't play it

monetization is done in a very fair way at least-MTX are there if you care about it, but not forced in any way.

Stash tabs are required to be bought as you get into the game, but are very directly correlated to how much you play, and with the game incentivizing stash resets with leagues, you are only really forced to buy enough stash tabs for how much you play. A player who plays less will require less stash tabs than a player who plays more. Free to try, $30ish to play casually $60-100+ to play incredibly intensely.

no ratling final boss, but multiplayer did work for me

good game

pretty good, wish there was post story content but the content that is there is fun and of moderate length

In 5 words: Asteroids x Path of Exile
Pros:
Soundtrack is good
Art direction is clever
Plenty of customization options (huge passive tree, class tree, ship type)
Wide range of mechanics (for it being based off Asteroids)
Literally $2
Cons:
lightning+attack fast=performance issues/freezing
I have only beat the game once (with that combination), so not sure if universally the game has performance issues as you get to later rounds or if it was just that specific combination
It isn't obvious when you've collected all keys

Overall: 10/10 if considering price 8.5/10 if ignoring price

good take on a digital card game.

very replayable

Worth a playthrough, but not the most replayable rpg.
Game looks fine, runs fine, but is missing some key elements to make it a replayable classic. Combat is deep enough to be interesting to figure out, but too shallow to be varied on second playthroughs, and the inability to speed up animations makes replaying the game somewhat tedious.

Chroma Squad is magic the first playthrough and dead in the second.

pretty good

terrific balance
tragic management, all else
what should, could have been?