Review: Path of Exile

Path of Exile is a hard-core dungeon crawler extraordinaire. Its release by New Zealand-based developer Grinding Gear Games caught me (and many others) completely by surprise when it appeared on Steam last week, promising free-to-play action in a dark and twisted fantasy setting.

The game is an isometric third-person action, role playing game. You maneuver around a world, slaying hordes of monsters with a variety of lethal implements and destructive forces, find equipment, upgrade your equipment, and go out to slay more demons.  There are some puzzles and quests, but most of the game consists of either frantic combat or diligently comparing your armour and equipment to those you extracted from the stomach of a hell-beast. If you’ve played Diablo, Torchlight, or Titan Quest you’ve seen the basic game-play before.

Essentially, its this for 80 hours but with more screaming

There is some story to be had here. You play as a criminal who has been sentenced to exile in the desiccated and broken land of Wraeclast, a land of darkness and madness where the dead rise from the graves. In other words, Zombie Australia. Picking a class also gives you a little bit of that character’s backstory, telling you why they were exiled in the first place. I should point out that each class has a set gender, so if you want to play a woman you must either choose to be a ranger, sentenced to Wraeclast for poaching, or a witch, guilty of… child murder. Yikes. Still, it must be nice to be a judge in a place where the answer to every crime is exile. I’m sure Rob Ford would approve.

Once that’s out of the way, the game proper opens up. The graphics aren’t as good as the top games in this field, but they do a decent job of conveying the atmosphere the creators intended and they didn’t make my processor chug too hard. The creature design is interesting as well. I”m especially a fan of the zombies that the Witch can raise, which are almost comically gory. Spell and weapon effects are decent, AND filling an area with flames is as satisfying as it normally is. Finally, it is as satisfying to acquire skills as it is to use them; the creators of the game are almost maniacally devoted to customization and with a little bit of tweaking any character can take on any role. In lieu of further explanation, here is a picture of the skill tree.

Completing the skill tree unlocks a dark power… a real one.

One thing really stood out about the game was its commitment to setting. The land is dotted with artifacts of interest that provide fully voiced background details, and in a clever move selling gear found in the field will garner you bits and pieces of utility items (such as scrolls that identify items), as they might in a real survivor economy. It makes sense that Zombie Australia would lack the expertise to build a mint. Unfortunately, the online aspects fracture the immersion. The chat window at the bottom left of the screen is filled with the idle chatter of players looking to buy, sell, or make asses of themselves and the number of players in the hub areas made me feel as if I was a tourist at Wraeclast-Land rather than a desperate exile.

Now, the game is free-to-play, and that means micro-transactions. Luckily the developers are standing by their promise of avoiding pay-to-win type items and consumables. Instead, they offer an almost dizzying array of effects, pets, and alternate skin that can allow you to bling out your character and equipment. Prices are wide ranging, and though they usually hover around $5-$10 per selection, extremes exist at both ends of the spectrum. For example, an in-game pet based on a New Zealand insect costs fifty cents, while a lighting spitting scorpion costs over a hundred real-world dollars. Heck, for a thousand bucks the developers will let you craft a unique item! Or you could just buy a dozen full-price triple-A titles on launch day. While you don’t need to purchase a thing to enjoy Path of Exile, it’s clear that being an in-game fashion victim could get expensive.

Zombies are the perfect accessory for a night on the town.

Is Path of Exile a decent game? Quite. Is it worth getting? Maybe. If you’re heavily involved in another dungeon crawler then there probably isn’t enough here to get you to switch. However if you prefer exploring new lands over power-leveling in existing in games or are looking for a cheap way to see what this genre is all about, it just might be your thing.