Last Epoch

This is what you get when a team full of passion but lacking skills make a video game. Good ideas meshed with jank. So where to start. The obvious, the graphics, let's not sugar coat this, this game looks bad, it looks 10 years older than it should, the character models are ugly and the animations aren't great, hit detection is very clunky and lacks fluidity. I will say the level design is alright. I get this does not the have the budget of AAA game but then why try to compete with games that have those budgets? On the good side the skill tree system is an interesting concept with each skill having their own skill tree for nice builds, it's a shame that most of those are stat related rather than providing you with different skills to tweak your build or add anything to the combat. Overall teh game is pretty mid, maybe if you are in the field for an ARPG and need a change from Diablo or Path of Exile you can give it a try, I would wait for a discount though. Otherwise go on Grim Dawn that game is older and better put together.

The recent reset killed my drive to play the game. Came back for 1.1 played for a few weeks then moved on to other stuff for a month and a half or so. Come back to find a complete reset was done. 1.2 doesn't even have a release date yet so this was decided to be done early. Reset was done because the economy is broken from what I'm reading due to people using a gold glitch. Why not go after those people cheating in the game instead, ban them? Instead feels like me and others are penalised for their cheating. When 1.2 comes out it feels like I have no trust for the game to not reset until 1.3. I don't play one single game religiously and like to switch off. Lots of people will be fine with this reset as the poll shows but for a lot of people this will be a turn off so this review is for them as a warning that your seasonal character may not last to long.

Last Epoch is a fun Action-RPG with nice complexity and reasonable difficulty. Even for a person not playing every ARPG there is, you can make it to end game and with the factions (esp. the trade faction) you can create nice builds without 100s of hours farming for the basics - instead you are able to grind for improved gear fitting your build.

Having said that: Eleventh hour games has the clear goal of losing the player base by all means necessary. The first measure to loose players is to do a refresh mid-season, which is solely caused by EHGs incompetence in preventing item duplication which destroyed the in-game economy. As a second measure to loose players, EHG decided on randomly dropping key features. I bought Last Epoch enthusiastically for the native Linux support, which I fully acknowledge is irrelevant for the majority of players. However, the native Linux support was removed mid-season (which they call cycle to further alienate players) with no adequate communication of any reason for doing so. So why should the majority not on Linux care? Well, what is your favourite feature that costs them a few quid to develop and might they just drop it next week? Ok, let's not be unreasonable and use Proton which is handily provided as a Wine fork by Valve. Have you ever tried playing an ARPG with under 10 FPS? It simply is not feasible, so I cannot play the game I enthusiastically bought in early access. Having player 440 hours I think it's fair to say that I got a lot of game for my money, still I feel defrauded by the unceremonial drop of an adequate client for my choice of OS. So, when looking for a new (to you) ARPG the window for buying Last epoch is closed, EHG does not want you to play.

I love this game, but right now I can't recommend it to anyone. Performance is at all time low. On a high end PC, it's basically unplayable for me right now. Connecting online takes 5+ minutes, with frequent disconnects. Offline, it still takes far too long. The game's stability continues to worsen with each and every patch, with radio silence from the devs. I know I'm not alone with this issue. Sad, because I purchased 5 copies of this game for myself and friends, as I wanted to support them. Since then, all those friends have quit due to performance issues.

Well, when they ended the cycle early, I guess they decided to go ahead and completely delete everything I earned during the cycle. Great way to chase players away is just delete stuff they earned, that you CLAIM they get to keep. ^^ This is still true, it's just not the point of the review anymore. ^^

Review update: Right so I've been playing offline since that seems to be the only way I can actually make real progress in the game (this is not about the weirdchamp wipe, I got over it), and it seems like the game could honestly be good if they went through and proofread all the incomplete tooltips and typos, graphical glitches, and polished movement just a little; The issue is, these basic things weren't done before releasing the game and in this state I don't think I can change my review to recommended, as much as I might like to.

Do better, because I know you can.

I can recommend the game only for a one-time playthrough, but as a seasonal grinding game it's not good.

One of the really good things presented in the game is crafting. It is cool, available soon after the story begins, not complicated and has a low entry threshold.

Otherwise the game has many issues that the developers have not addressed since release.

1. Horrible AI non-english localization with a crucial bugs in the skills and items naming.

2. Faction system to which your items are bounded. And you can't change the faction, because your build will simply not have items. Also, leveling up a new faction requires a huge amount of grinding before it starts giving anything good.

3. Iconvenient market faction. Checking prices of items takes a lot of time and eats up all the other benefits. Also you can't tarde some kinds of equipment until you level up your faction (which can take a very long time).

4. Boring and inconvinient Fortune faction options. The faction offers you a reroll of telescopes with mini-quests to find specific items, but the game does not even tell you where to complete these quests (often it is completely random).

5. Lack of balance in damage types, defense and classes. When going to a empowered monoliths of high-level dungeons - if you do not have enough damage, you will constantly die from stacking damage over time on you, from which there are practically no ways to protect yourself in the game, except for oneshotting everything with something strong and meta.

6. Imbalance in defensive mechanics. Ward still dominates as universal defence, while HP investments are not rewarding. Endurance is completely unusable.

7. Boring and monotonous endgame in general. Each new season offers to unlock monolith timelines and then farm them, with minor changes.
The unlocking process itself is terribly boring and in the end of each timeline you have to go through mandatory quests in which you have to run back and forth to target points.
After that, you'll unlock grinding a monolith feels like going through a bunch of useless reward nodes while getting stabilization points or waiting for a node with a specific type of unique item. Thats all.

8. Set items cannot have legendary potential, which makes most of them completely useless.

9. Unique items are mostly useless, unless they're meta or something universal.

10. Party play was terrible - desyncs, unable to get to the same location, freezes on loading, quests state desynchronization.

11. Bugs related to monster skill targeting, when monsters hit in a different area than the one the game shows you (for example bug still presented on Rahyeh rectangular DoT ground in the monolith).

In conclusion, the game has good potential, but it needs a lot of work to become really good.

Sadly can't recommend the game, even though it looked so promising.

The devs have demonstrated inability to address issues and improve the game's peformance over multiple patches since relase, in fact the game is getting progressively worse even though multiple "fixes". FPS is tanking below 60 on high end gaming rig, dungeons are still absolute disconnect hell and unplayable in a party with infinite loading screens. Echoes still have huge memory leak even though this was "fixed". Bunch of missing textures repalced with "white squares".

The whole game feels like it's still in early access.

This game has gone downhill so fast. I WANT to love this game, and I did for awhile. They are self destructing their game with the horrible changes, and not fixing bugs while introducing a whole new set of bugs. There is virtually NO QA/QC. EVERY single patch immediately has to be re-patched and/or removed, EVERY TIME! I can no longer recommend this game. Give it 6-12 months and I'll try again.

As of right now, the game crashes if you so much as purchase a new stash tab or sort things in a tab... not good. I would not recommend the game in its current state if they can't fix these optimization issues... other than that it is a good game.

This game has had its ups and downs. I think it's generally a decent product, but every patch the same bugs come back, the same problems. QA is shoddy and they are rushing to compete with behemoths instead of slowing down and focusing on quality. They should be looking to Grim Dawn, rather than PoE or Diablo, for inspiration.

I know that performance is a big focus for them, but I don't play on a top-tier machine and my system completely locks up every dozen monoliths in the endgame. I tolerate it two or three times before I uninstall, give it a month, and check back. I don't regret spending the money and certainly got my value for it, but I'm not sure I would want to recommend this to friends for fear of them having the same problems I do.

Travel skills feel terrible, it doesn't allow you to traverse terrain the way you expect it to, and you often get stuck on objects. An example would be the inability to traverse across a ledge with the travel skill.

Hitboxes on enemies and player character feels horrible. Things that should not be hitting are hitting you regardless. Even telegraphed AoE attacks that do not move somehow still hit you when you are out of the indicated area.

Enemies have insane desync, even more noticable when you are playing with a ranged option. Enemies sometimes travel and suddenly teleport behind or past you, and your ranged hits clearly hits but then shows damage way too late.

Looting items for some reason is on mouse release instead of mouse click and it cannot be changed to toggled either. Just downright horrible "feature".

I bought this at full price because it had native linux support, but they stealthly removed the linux port. And for what is worth the linux version worked perfectly for me.
I don't care about proton, and if I would I would had spend my money on something else to begin with.

Good gameplay. Deep customization. But now it's broken on Linux and won't even let you install to run in compatibility mode.

Back to Grim Dawn, I guess.

Outstanding job, devs!

They removed native Linux support out of the blue in a small event patch. And that was one of the main reasons for me to get the game.

The game still suffers from some performance/optimization issues and the developer stealthily removed the Linux version of the game without an official announcement or a change to the Steam page.

Really not happy with EHG.

I really like this game and come back to it after every other patch. It's not as polished as PoE but since it's only 35€ and doesn't ask you for micro transactions like stash tabs it's a really good deal.

Great APRG, middle ground between Poe and D4.

Really good character progression and balanced around finding and crafting your own items rather than trading, and you can still trade if you want.

Build making is very fun as you do not need a Master's degree like in Poe.

I have been playing since Early access and the game gets better with every update, just let them cook.

Still a bit rough around the edges and light on content, but probably the best ARPG right now if you want something more approachable and less time-consuming than Path of Exile but more interesting than Diablo 4.

I don't recommend this game at this time - way to many punitive mechanics that make it a time sink. IE: Arena - you go through 40 rounds - (20 minutes spent) get to the arena boss which is the whole point and you die - you wasted 20 minutes. Same with dungeons - it's punitive in a soft core environment.

Secondly - I find that the mechanics are clunky - there's no real movement speed boosts - and people the game pace is relatively slow to other games - also - the builds aren't exactly clear - as in the in game runes/forging has great potential but comes with a steep learning curve.

I'd wait until this game is more soundly built out with user experience in mind - along with some testing - and understanding their population. This genre is heavily older players who don't have time for punitive mechanics - or mechanics that are punishing. I did finish the story line - did some monoliths, etc.

PS: I've not often written a review - so the fact that I'm going out of my way to actually write this review should indicate the level of frustration and how grueling it was to get to end game and experience it in the hopes that it gets better. It doesn't, it only gets worse.

So addicting I had to uninstall it after 400 hours. Levelled up 3 characters to max level throughout beta and then release towards Season 1. I haven't felt that level of immersion and put in hundreds of hours into an ARPG since Grim Dawn and Diablo 3 years ago. I've had so much fun with it, but decided to quit for a while and uninstall it. I'll give myself a 1 year break. Enough time to miss it, maybe have it feel fresh again and I'll come back to it later at the start of another season. Amazing game. Truly can't recommend it enough. I'll be back later for another 400 hours!

Fun but still feels really unfinished despite being out of early access for awhile now. Maybe in a few years it'll be worth playing but right now I don't see a reason to choose this over poe or grim dawn

I'm just playing offline and don't care about "cycles". I don't have much free time to game, so came back to it now after some months, and logged in as "legacy", but my whole stash is classified as "1.0" and "remove only" now, and there's a new empty "legacy" stash... Seriously, fuck that. I had organised it carefully in tabs and wanted to simply continue playing, but now they expect me to re-buy stash tabs and move all the stuff over to the new empty "legacy" tab, which will presumably just get reset and locked randomly again? What the hell? Just let me play the offline game and don't mess with it! If i knew they would do this i wouldn't have bothered organising the stash in the first place... Actually i wouldn't have bought the game in the first place. I'm done with this game, i wasn't really enjoying it anyway compared to past ARPGs -- i was just going to give it another shot to pull me in and it pulls this garbage instead.