Recent reviews by Psykrom

I bought and played the original game and all expansions on and offline for countless hours since its original release in 2011 and came back to it many times over the years, mainly to mod the game and crash the engine beyond repair, to learn under the incredibly strict master that is called "trial and error", over and over again.
Many years later, the nexus modding community finally fixed the game engine for the developers...
I implemented many mods to my loadouts and by the end of my journey, I had to become very picky, not to reach the loadout limit. I created a few mods, scripts, textures and meshes as well, kindling my creative side as part of the Nexus.

I broke my game with it more times than I can count and had to start over my play through so many times, I cannot remember. I have spent more hours in third party tools and TES5EDIT to fix mod conflicts and overwrite them manually by hand, than to actually play the game (until I learned how to use scripts).
It was a truly harrowing experience, but the blissful delight to enabling me to enact my role playing fantasies was most satisfying.

I will remember the modded game as one of the most immersive games I ever played, being so perfectly tailored to my tastes and fantasies. The graphics in this came can be pushed up to a scale that will blow every AAA title you know out of the water. You have never seen how a world crafted with modded graphics relying on ENB filters, super high polygon count and handcrafted textures and animations tied to incredible NPC behavior scripts, a perfectly crafted world challenging world, realistic and fun combat and character progression looks and feels like.

But enough with my rambling, I only wrote this to indulge in reminiscences, but you may see it as my long overdue homage to the community and their incredible efforts and development of what one should have expected from the developers themselves, though I do understand that one cannot pass on being provided with an army of fans to fix their problems, who work free of charge for one's benefit, while not having to share the laurels with them.

Take care now and have fun!

Whoever thought making this a team dungeon crawler, while implemented friendly fire was a good idea, ended the game before it even left early access. I for one will not touch it again.

Why? Because worst case you end up with some foolish kiddies in your group, who mistake the game for fortnite or something and never learned what teamplay means.

All they want is to try and PK you as soon as they see you. Even if you take them down, you end up with a huge disadvantage, depleting the resources you would need to confront the harder monsters in the dungeon and clearing the harder dungeons will most likely be impossible alone.

A royal PITA and waste of my time.

I've been playing Last Epoch for countless hours since release and been through the short downs with everyone else. Looking back, the game turned out just as popular as I expected.

I thought I already knew the game, but when it released I was not prepared for the many changes they had in store for us.

Last Epoch is among the first games I had already extensively played during its early access, but kept playing for days straight after its release.
I have so much fun and enjoy everything about this game. Every possible playstyle and roleplay hero fantasy I can come up with turns out to be viable.
The mechanics are fun to interact with and I can predict there is a long road of new milestones waiting ahead of us.

Speaking of the transition from early access to release: I am still baffled by how they tuned up the graphics, shaders and fluidity of effects and animations and how much effort they put into the level design throughout the campaign and monoliths, with a lot of variation of scenery and beautiful designs.

I always loved slaying monsters in this game - and it only got better with new enemies to face and loot to chase. Leveled a bunch of characters in online mode already, pushed endgame but always come up with new things I want to try out next.

I think the developers took responsibility and made good on their promise.
They keep delivering content and support tirelessly.
This is why I very much look forward to spend even more time in this game and to see all the future content.

I recommend the game wholeheartedly to veterans and newcomers of the genre alike.
It is rare to get so much entertainment value out of such an affordable investment.

I feel certain that Last Epoch has a bright future ahead - enjoy and have fun!

EDIT: Nominated for game of the year 2024.

When my buddy streamed Grim Dawn to me for the first time, I was not convinced.
Not much later I decided to try and see for myself.
Looking back today, I somehow ended up with a shocking amount of logged hours on the record.

Many people describe Grim Dawn as a gritty ARPG that boasts some old school vibes, which isn't wrong by all means. But if you do a full dive, you'll learn that the game is multi-faceted and presents a lot of different scenery, factions and enemies to enjoy and explore.

Grim Dawn enables you to create literally tons of different builds over a huge array of class combinations, with countless ways to develop and play your characters.

I quickly came to love everything about the lore, villains, npc's, crafting and the overall gameplay loop. The many ways of hunting loot (totems, crucible, hero and nemeses bosses, chests, skeleton key and secret dungeons), are very much to my liking as well and kept me busy for endless hours.

Each time I found a new possible build defining item, I was already rolling a new character, trying to make it work somehow. Their devotion skill tree is something I absolutely adore and one of the most artistic ways in the genre to convey further power to the player, while sticking to their own universe and lore.

This game has almost everything I want from a very good ARPG. Great gameplay and character development mechanics, flair, great music and sounds. Ultrawide immersion always plays a huge part for me as well, which it fully supports.
Something more rare in the genre which Grim Dawn enables, is a full isometric camera-rotation around your character, allowing you to see things from a different angle.

There are few things left to be desired for me. One has always been a live service, with ongoing server and content support (content as in season mechanics), to provide a clean and safe multiplayer environment, with an incentive to play together and compete with the community in different ways.

That aside, just a few more voice actors to imbue the many lines of lore with a soul, would've further refined the overall quality, but as an avid reader this is something I can do without.

I know live service costs a lot of funds. But had they done this, they would've tremendously increased their overall popularity, allowing them to draw in even more fellow gamers. That way they could have taken the vacant throne in the sky, at least for a time.

The game went through a lot of balancing over the years after leaving early access, with nice enemy model and game mechanic updates. The latest addition was the introduction of a proper dodge mechanic, while handing some more power to enemies to keep it still challenging.

They recently announced a final campaign addon being in the works, with lots of new content coming our way, which I very much want to support and enjoy.

More queue and server instability than playing. Not getting back to the server due to login servers getting locked. Non-existent customer service. The game could have been successful if it wasn't for bots.

EDIT: old review but a comment made me leave an update.
Promises had been made but not kept over and over. Friends and I migrated months ago, only thing that kept me active for longer was being a guild leader.

Their timing and rollout was beyond awful. Many core issues persisted weeks into release, like bugged honing, fortress and crafting. Some balance issues persist up to this day (pvp).

The greatest big bad in this game has always been the bots and probably always will be.
Their anti-cheat engine simply sucks and they never got a handle on the issue.
Bots ruined the whole economy as well, but it mattered little to those unlucky souls who sold their souls and invested real money for currency.

Bots still inflate the numbers of active players.
Game had a few moments when we actually got down to play, but depended on how badly your server was affected by botters. Most likely the game with most logged afk hours on steam and most overhyped success story due to millions of bots being logged in during release.

I have been waiting patiently for months now to get a response towards my petition on the steam forum. The community wished for a rollback of the 2K launcher introduced earlier this year, cause it left us unable to actually play.

The game had been released for a couple of years and I expected a stable modding environment. I was very excited about finishing my campaign, when out of the blue they released their overlay launcher. It broke all our save games.
Previously the game had been modded and launched through the steam launcher. When they pushed out their own launcher, all modded games became incompatible with the new launcher and modded loadouts could not be played anymore.

I for one was running a huge list of hand-picked mods. Removing them mid-play is impossible.
I could not complete my playthrough as a result and wasted many hours of gameplay and efforts.

They forced their launcher on us without any announcement, ignored the wishes of the community and felt zero responsibility towards breaking our games. There was zero response, nor any apology as far as I am aware of.

Hundreds of players have joined in support of the petition on the steam community hub forum, but thus far there has been zero response towards it by any dev. I will not buy another 2K game in the future as a result.

They only released the launcher to implement a convenient way to advertise more of their games through it, with zero caution given towards how it would affect the player base.

FINAL UPDATE:

Their solution to this problem was to shut down the petition for commenting.
Mine was to put the publisher and developer on ignore for the steam store.

Should have written this review long ago. Probably the worst purchase I ever made and the reason why I quit supporting unknown early access titles and kickstaters for good.

Back then there was still no proper steam refund system. Today I would have refunded this unfinished piece of rubbish game within the first 15 minutes.

The regret sticks; the Dev's are a bunch of scammers who never finished but abandoned the game for good and ran away with the communities hopes and money. All I could think of was blacklisting them once that was clear. They should be sued and banned with eligible accounts being refunded their investment.

When the game was released, I encountered a game breaking bug (micro stutters), which left me unable to play. My forum post from back then should still be around.

After spending several hours assisting a Dev with logs and in-game-testing, I was promised they would fix the issue, but when I wanted to pick the game up again 6 months later, the issue still persisted.

Was unable to refund it back then, as I got the key from a third party store. Also no compliance when I mentioned that. Will never buy from said store again and recommend to stay away from the companies involved.

This is a great game and a worthy successor to the Risen series.
The atmosphere is very immersive: the environment is spectacular and varies a lot compared to Risen 2, the game comes with great music and video sequences and the quests and dialogues are as entertaining as usual.
There is a lot of collectibles and treasures to be found and a lot to explore!
Free exploration - If you finish a quest related task it will count even if you don't currently have that quest, meaning you can't ruin your games progression by accident, which is great!
You can fight your enemies with meele and ranged weapons or magic attacks.
You can have henchmen, summons and your own ship's crew! Your ship will hold your henchmen, it can be used for traveling, naval battle against sea monsters and to board enemy ships! There are mini-games (arm wrestling, drinking game, knife throwing game) where you can wager gold to make profit or to win a few rare collectibles.
This is 50-60 hours of fun gameplay (with dlc's even more) - enjoy the game!

ultrawide support was stealth removed today, which was solid for many leagues now. I never had any issues with it, in fact it was such a great quality of life feature, it heavily influenced my support for the game and decision to buy new hardware.

Removing ultrawide support is the worst backwards decision I can imagine. I cannot live without it, nor imagine worse circumstances to ruin my experience to this degree.

I refunded my supporter pack over this, which I bought earlier this week. I can and will not support such a decision, nor does the digital content look anywhere close to what it resembled when I formed my buying decision with the superior field of view prior this change.

It truly pains me, for the support team was always very kind. It is not their fault, but someone certainly is to blame.

But now that it has come to this, it's literally a nightmare being made flesh.
I feel consumed by regret and sorrow. I just wanted to have some fun and relax with my favorite game, but seems like I am asking for too much, despite all the pieces I have given away of myself to support this game over many years.