Review is for version 0.9, released in March 2023.
If you are following the ARPG circles, you must have heard of Last Epoch. While not hugely popular like Diablo or Path of Exile, the game has managed to acquire a lot of buzz with its early access version and the acclaim is well deserved. For a smaller indie team and doing its own thing and having to compete against these giants they have done pretty well to survive so far.
Last Epoch does some things pretty well and arguably better than its competitors. The skill system is amazing with each skill having its own tree by itself, as long as you put it in one of your 5 spec slots, you'll be able to invest up to 20 points in each pushing the skill in many possible directions. The game has 5 base classes and 3 different masteries for each (giving you really 15 classes), and within these classes there are many different viable builds too. So for a Diablolike fan, this is kind of like a wet dream with so many interesting possibilities. Another thing that the game does very well is the crafting system. It's easy to craft, dump the gear into the forge and use shards to improve it. What's great here is that you can do it from early, mid or late game and you don't need to wait til the very to juice up your pieces. It's simple but efficient, and acquiring shards is always going to be good rewards from killing enemies. It makes the gameplay loop pretty interesting.
The combat is pretty standard of what you would expect, lots of enemies and pretty much follows the standards of the genre. As you gear and level up, you'll eventually be able to clear many enemies quick. Then again this is nothing new. The campaign is fine with this concept of travelling through time and while there's nothing wrong with it, you are mostly here to kill hordes of monsters and collect that loot. I enjoyed the campaign which ends around level 55, on which you enter the end game system called the Monolith.
Unfortunately I feel this is place lacking for the game and I hope this will be improved for the eventual 1.0 launch. The monolith is kind of this mapping system similar to Path of Exile, you've got this grid of areas and by clearing the maps you acquire some stability. Once you've acquired enough stability, you get to do one of the 3 echo quests and when those are all cleared you acquire a permanent blessing and get to the next part of the Monolith. Which is the same shit all over again but instead of level 58, it's level 62. And then it just goes on and on and on by small increments until the final 3 that are level 90. After those are done, well you get to empowered monoliths which are the level 100 of those and are much more challenging. The problem here is that the content is insanely repetitive and while you keep acquiring pieces of gear for your build, there's nothing really exciting to get to unless you are really into the min/maxing thing. This system definitely needs a rework and I think we need better end game activities. There's also 3 dungeons and the arena, but none of those are really any better.
Anyway the foundation of Last Epoch is excellent. It's pretty hard to compete against a game like Path of Exile that had 10 years of content added and that kept refining its end game, but the game shows a very strong potential and with a few more things added it would be not too far behind. Hoping for the best for the team, I've had lots of fun playing the game and definitely gives me my "diablolike" fill that I need every few months but eventually the end game becomes a bore and I do hope the devs will work on that aspect. If you like games like Diablo, Path of Exile and Grim Dawn, this is definitely one worth looking into.
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