Finished the story and played some endgame.
I believe the story isn't fully finished, but doesn't matter too much, it was quite a fun ~25 hrs.
There seem to be a bunch of very cool endgame activities that actually introduce unique content rather than recycling campaign stuff.
What I love:
- enormous build variety and casual friendly as well
- skills have their own skills trees
- itemization and crafting
- loot filter (both useful but also quite essential)
- general feel of the combat
- sound, environments, colorful design
- leveling always feels meaningful, skills and character level independently
- endgame loop, actually has unique bosses and some additional story beats (but very basic)
- dungeons with very unique mechanics that extend to the boss fights
- managing affixes on gear feels quite important and meaningful
- enemy variety
What is just good enough:
- the voice acting is decent for the most part with some jarring exceptions
- animations are good, not great like in Diablo 4 for example, but they get the job done
- graphics are good, again not great but it's not an issue
- for the most part levels are linear, with some open arenas a bit later
- coop play is decent, feels a bit clunky at times with how quests are handled but not a big deal
- story and characters are OK, nothing special, motivating enough to move forward and see what happens
Needs improvement:
- item designs don't aways match up with their drawings, especially for unique, which is a shame
- NPC portraits sometimes don't match up with character model
- some missing voice lines, or who is voiced and who isn't feels random at times
- story is convoluted and would benefit from some sort of a diagram explaining all this jumping between timelines
This game could easily sell for $60 as it's one hell of an achievement. Compared to Diablo 4, it is much more fun. Diablo 4 was excellent in the 1st act, and then it was kinda samey, especially with the limited skill trees and the pain of having to reslot aspects.
This game is better in every way except for the aesthetics, and even then it's 80-90% there and even beats in in certain areas because it has good variety and color while diablo 4 is washed out and looks very similar regardless where you are adventuring.
I feel we need an OT for this, I might put one together, it would be a damn shame for anyone who loves ARPGs to sleep on this one. The online was very stable this week and otherwise the game is polished and bug free.
