Recent reviews by hardolaf

My background: Over 1.4K hours in POE since I switched to playing it on Steam. Started playing it back in open beta and 1.0 during college. Have played every Diablo game well into their endgames with over 1,000 combined hours in Diablo series games. I have played a ton of Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, Titan Quest, etc. over the years totally over 1,000 hours between all of them.

I just got done with pushing through the first Atlas passive skills quest (10 Tier 1 maps) and ran a couple of Tier 2 maps.

I started 3 different characters and played each of them to at least the middle of Act 2. They were in order:
1. Grenadier + Crossbow Mercenary
2. Fire Sorceress (would have transitioned to cold+lightning after ascension)
3. Infernalist necro army (Witch start) with Raging Spirits, Flame Wall, and Skeletal Arsonists

I took builds 1 and 2 to mid Act 2 (right before the Trial of Sekhema) and I took the 3rd buiild to the endgame. My views on the game play for each of the classes is as follows:

1. The game play of swapping ammo types is absolute trash. The timing and smoothness of it is absolutely horrendous especially as you then shoot with a different key. While cool in theory, the implementation is a nightmare in terms of managing all of the key presses that you need to do unless you have a MMO mouse where you can rebind the buttons. The default controls or even just using WASD at the same time as controlling the ammo swaps is horrendous. With click to move, most of the skills get canceled while moving making the play style virtually impossible to play.

2. The play style was absolutely super fun using a projectile skill combined with flame wall to deal huge amounts of damage in a combo. Weapon But gearing anything other than the weapon (+level of <element> gems) was generally quite difficult to get decent affixes. I would have continued this but started build 3 the next morning with a group of friends.

3. Minions are super weak in the early game and you're forced to also use spells. But because you're focusing on building towards minions, you forgo a lot of gear that would improve your spells. Once you can invest in both minion life and damage, minions really start kicking butts. Using Flame Wall plus any projectile minions results in a huge damage buff. It's not overpowered, but it definitely feels better that not doing it. Now the big problem with minions is that the revive timer is global for all minions and not per minion. So there are many times where you will die or almost die because all of your minions have died and instead of investing in player defenses on the passive tree, you are forced to invest in minion only defenses. There are also many collision issues with party members and minions that make group play with a minion build somewhat not fun.

Overall, I did have fun for awhile. After a time, as my friends dropped the game one-by-one due to a combination of technical issues and not having fun at certain times, the game became more of a slog than fun. I got to endgame just so I could actually give an honest and comprehensive review.

My main pain points and why I won't recommend the game:

1. The crafting system is halfway between wanting to give us enough currency to actually use it on equipment and requiring us to hoard currency for that one amazing base item that we can finally use our currency on. Either items on the ground and in merchants need to be significantly improved across the board, or currency drops need to be increased massively. I like that there is less trash on the ground compared to the prior game, but without currency, items which I would otherwise interact with become trash because I cannot interact with them due to being poor. Giving good currency drop rates late in endgame (and drop rates didn't seem much better in early waystones) does absolutely nothing for having bad drop rates during the campaign especially with a campaign that could easily take less skilled players 40-50+ hours to complete.

2. The new item rarity system is amazing in theory! As long as you have a group of 5 friends willing to play at all times so that you can actually take advantage of it. Even just having 1 friend play with you significantly improves the rarity of all drops. And while it's true that there is less loot per player as fanboys of the game like to point out, the overall usefulness and utility of those drops is exponentially higher for every single player that you have in the group. Imagine that for a solo player you can kill a boss and drop 8 items worth somewhere between not worth picking up and disenchantment trash. With a party of 6, you'll drop 16 items all worth IDing and possibly using if they match the bases you're looking for. So you go from 8 items worth nothing per player to 2 items potentially worth using per player on average by going from solo play to 6-person group play.

3. White/normal monsters are unfun health sponges that give no reward. Even in Dark Souls, they'd at least give a token amount of souls for every one that you kill. In POE2, you have to kill a lot to even get a token amount of experience that you can measure and the tankier ones can take longer to kill than magic and rare enemies in some cases.

4. The same horrible rare and magic monster modifiers that the community hates in POE made their way into POE2. Rare and magic monsters should never be more dangerous or take longer to kill than a map or story boss.

5. GGG made Sanctum (now Sekhema) and Ultimatum into the replacement for the Trials of Ascendancy (Labyrinth) in POE. These two mechanics suck and they made 2 of my friends so frustrated trying to get their ascendancy points that they up and rage quit the game thus looping back to more problems in terms of gearing my character due to issue number 2. Honestly unless both are significantly reworked, I don't know if I'll return to the game as both mechanics have sucked ever since they were introduced in POE and continue to suck now.

6. The new maps are gorgeous and the artists should be commended, but the size and maze-factor of the maps is absolute trash in much of Act 2 and 3. Act 1 seems well polished but Act 2 and 3 seem like they were designed to make people want to quit the game in terms of having never ending dead ends, features you cannot get through, maps so large that you could easily boil eggs just walking from one side to the other, etc once all of the monsters are dead. These honestly made me want to quit the game entirely, but I decided to keep going to give the game a fair review.

7. GGG implemented a souls-like level reset and loss of maps on death mechanic which I kind of like because it forces them to balance around such a mechanic. However, GGG also copied over the balance approach from POE which assumes that players paid for 6 portals and want to use them. Overall, cheap and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ one shots are still in POE2 and it makes the game anti-fun as we lose a lot more than just a portal and 10% of experience now.

The best factory game ever made. I have a few too many hours in it and everyone should play it.

The Shattered Space makes Mass Effect 3's ending feel well written.

At default settings on a 4K 120 Hz OLED monitor with a RTX 4090, this game runs the menu at 11 FPS average. At default settings on the same system, upon immediately loading into a map, the game runs at 23 FPS average. This is worse than a console experience and should never have been released in this state.

The game has a very innovative approach to the classic "aliens invade earth" genre of games. In just my first 6 hours, I already can tell that I will sink hundreds of hours into the game.

The last 4 patches have continuously removed player base power requiring more and more grinding to be able to play and enjoy the endgame. The latest patch specifically nerfed loot to such an extreme that the game is no longer fun to play for most people. On top of this, that change was not communicated to players in the patch notes nor were a variety of other changes including 32:9 resolution support which was removed without warning or even an honorable mention in the patch notes. Overall, this latest patch (amongst the previous several) feels deceitful in order for GGG to bait people into buying supporter packs before the launch of the newest patch and accompanying time limited league. In the current state of the game and especially given the recent deceit by Grinding Gear Games, I cannot recommend this game to anyone.

A fun little snake game.

Amazing game. Give me badge.

Great RPG.

I've often taken months long hiatuses from Rimworld but everytime I come back to the game, I find a more amazing experience than the last time.