Wow, this game is my new obsession. Insanely fun gameplay, a good story that keeps things moving and interesting, really awesome enemy designs and an insane about builds and customizations you can do to tweak your character, giving the game an insane amount of replayability. I haven't even bought the DLC yet but that will change, but this game has such a wealth of wonderful content. My only big complaint is navigation. Finding quest locations and getting around can be quite frustrating at times as you aren't really given exact locations of quests until you get RIGHT up to them, meaning you can spend a lot of time looking for side quests if you aren't using a guide. It would've been better if the game at least had a large circle around the area it is in if they didn't want to make a direct marker. Sometimes roads would get cut off or changed as well between playthroughs, but it would sometimes force you to go the LONG way around, and if you went through that area recently you won't have any enemies to fight even. Also the ending was lame. Real lame. Like early 2000s PC lame. Those are pretty small complaints though, I enjoyed the game so much and I plan on doing multiple playthroughs, doing the DLC, and getting a bunch of characters to the endgame, meaning this review will probably get updated after that.

Some points about Grim Dawn, my go to ARPG:

- Massive build variety. Being able to combine two of the nine classes ensures you always have a reason to play again.
- Starting combat is a slog. You're mostly just clicking on dudes for the first ten levels or so
- You can actually make choices that affect the world unlike most other ARPGs
- Great worldbuilding. I originally was not into Grim Dawn's setting. But after talking to the characters and reading the lore notes I was intrigued.
- A ton of hidden content. I mean entire zones hidden away.

Bottom line? I like it

dares to ask "what if titan quest was good?"

takes the dual class concept and runs away with it, making all the right additions and subtractions necessary to be an absolute pleasure. if you're drawn in any way to the intricacies of stats, items, and character building the options are both inviting enough to be accessible and dense enough for munchkins and other sickos to lose hours weighing choices and min/maxing every little detail

isn't as robust as path of exile but has a better body of content and the good grace to improve over time while PoE hung itself by its own directionless maximalism in the intervening years

like all diablo clones the act of play comes second to the conceptualizing, simply being a means of translating the work of theorycrafting into something tangible. what's important -- outside the behind the scenes spreadsheet tinkering -- is the heft of skill impacts and dopamine pops of each item cluster

cartoon physics are employed to their best ends as ragdolls soar with every final thud, crack, whomp and home run bludgeon, and the expressive itemization and excellent loot filter keep the wheel turning smoothly while giving a satisfyingly direct means of conveying even the smallest tweaks to your character

we can go back n forth about the genre's queasy skinner box bullshit but any game where I can fuse a demolitionist with an inquisitor and end up a purifier is extremely sick in my book