Review: Path of Exile 2 Early Access
A game with potential, but that sits in an undoubtedly dodgy spot in terms of soul.
The argument against reviewing an early access title is the same as the argument against buying an early access title: it ain’t finished, chief. Many areas of the game will be “off limits” to critique, or at least excused with the reasoning that it might improve when the game is fully released.
My rebuttal of this position is pretty simple; it’s a game that you can buy, install, and play right now.
If developers are going to sell unfinished games to people, then someone should tell those people how that game actually is at the minute, because the developer is not exactly going to say “this is a buggy piece of shit that you shouldn’t touch because the game really falls apart after the first two hours” on the store page.
What you probably want to know is this: is this game worth playing at the minute, how serious are the problems, and will this game be good when it does eventually release? The answer to these questions in order: “that depends”, “pretty serious”, and “if they can figure out what they’re doing, really good”.
With that deeply unsatisfying answer out of the way, we can get into it.
Path of Exile 2 is the sequel to Path of Exile — the sort of cutting insight that you come to me for — but the game really has to be understood within that context. PoE is a live service game that has been floating around for yonks (over ten years), the long-lived uncrowned king of the ARPG genre ever since Blizzard dramatically, cartoonishly, and auction-housedly shat the bed with vanilla Diablo III.
I have played Path of Exile, but I did not enjoy it. While I can appreciate that the game exists as a “build your own game-busting build” experience, where the fun is in navigating the county-sized passive tree and gear options rather than in the moment to moment gameplay, the fact that it felt so poor to actually play compared to contemporaries was a constant turn-off.
I’m a simple man, when I smash something with a club, it has to feel right.
It’s always difficult to elaborate on “game feel”, as it really exists as a combination of many different elements, but it’s hard to convey weight and effort in a game where attack and skill speed scaling might mean that your animation is playing so fast that it can be scarcely said to be “animated” at all.
It turns out that Grinding Gear Games, developers of Path of Exile, actually agreed. For a long while, and much to the chagrin of the community, they had been uncomfortable with the speed of the game, but they didn’t feel like they could change it within the title because the community had gotten used to it.
Hence, Path of Exile 2, a focus on vibrancy of animations, “feel”, and an intention for an altogether slower pace.
Path of Exile 2 is, at least initially, a success in that regard.
I’ve not played an ARPG that gave me the same gratification when crushing zombies since Diablo III (which, despite everything else, did have great feel), and while we might want to be lofty intellectuals who live in the clouds of abstract DPS, if you’re going to be hitting monsters for hundreds of hours, it should look, sound, and feel great. It is a shame, then, that not all classes and abilities are born equal. More on this later.
This new and improved weight comes — again, initially — attached to Souls-esque style combat, where many skills have high commitment animations, and now there’s a dodge roll for evading gigantic boss swings, AoEs, and quick repositioning. It’s also really quite challenging, and where other ARPGs have treated the player’s first runthrough as something of a tutorial, Path of Exile 2 has your arse being explored in the early game by collections of particularly troublesome common mobs.
I find this change refreshing, as I fit squarely in the camp of believing that even the early part of a game (when the player is still getting to grips with it) should be fulfilling, and we shouldn’t excuse poor gameplay with “it’ll get better in X hours”. I’m not learning to play the violin here, I should be engaged from minute zero.
Monster design is delightfully horrific, and thoroughly in the Diablo vein of being genuinely repugnant at parts. There’s also a sincerity to the horror that I felt that Diablo IV lacked. Where the latter seemed to veer off into “how awful can we make this because people really hated Diablo III’s artstyle”, Path of Exile 2’s style is dark without going over the top. This world is suitably grim, believably miserable, and it fosters a desire to smash it all to pieces because nothing of value is being lost.
In fact, the whole game looks fantastic, and probably has the best freeze effect that I’ve seen in an ARPG, maybe even a game in general. Yes, I’m including Crysis in that.
Does it feel “early access”?
Not really. The campaign’s not complete with roughly half the content missing (Acts 4-6), so you’re left at a bit of a weird spot in terms of story, and the game crashed a few times before I did a driver update and cleared my shader cache, but it’s otherwise remarkably polished from a technical perspective. You could be fooled into thinking you were playing a game that had gone gold, though perhaps that isn’t saying much in the current era.
We’re several paragraphs of praise in, and you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. I understand. I said right at the start that the game was “maybe” worth buying, had deep flaws, yet I’ve been gushing this whole time. Sure.
There are serious issues.
Some of them will not be noticeable until you’ve gotten to the later parts of the game (cruel difficulty, endgame), but some of them are frustrating right the way through. The reason why these problems cause me to give the game a “maybe” in terms of its future is that the worst of them aren’t due to bugs, balance, or a lack of content (though those are present, with balance issues being present in spades), but due to a confused design philosophy.
Admittedly, part of my problem is simply with the class I started with. Warrior is probably the “purest” melee class of the bunch, but often feels the absolute worst to play.
It’s easy to get this statement mixed up with balance, but it runs far deeper than that. Yes, warrior probably has poorer endgame performance than the other classes: it’s a slow melee-focused, armour-enhancing class with a bunch of skills that have irreducible animation times, in a game where melee is strictly disadvantaged, armour is absolutely dreadful, and big commitment animations get you killed.
There are builds that work at endgame and escape these problems, but they’re also interminably dull. Stampede is one of the best warrior abilities because of its gigantic AoE, immediate damage, and movement aspect, but it just feels so sluggish and miserable to actually use (it is also a huge miss that the skill doesn’t push or displace enemies, so you end up weaving around them like an apologetic waiter).
These problems are apparent before the endgame, they just get worse with difficulty as many of the skills that you might have liked previously become completely non-viable: this is to say, basically everything except for Stampede, Hammer of the Gods, Cultist Greathammer mace strike, and the warcries.
I’ve not played monk yet, but the consensus I’ve seen online is that if you want to play melee, you play monk — not just because it performs better, but because it feels better as well.
There are universal issues that impact all classes, however.
Outside of some truly busted builds, access to movement speed buffs and travel abilities is very limited relative to other ARPGs. This slower pace would suggest a shrinking of map sizes to compensate, but the opposite has seemingly happened; maps are fucking enormous, maze-like, and deeply frustrating to navigate because they frequently contain dead-ends or totally nonsense topography.
You will spend significant amounts of time doing absolutely nothing but walking past bad loot and corpses. This is to say nothing of lever-pulling, which is sometimes required multiple times a level, and involves a multi-second animation each time that leaves you completely vulnerable. If GGG are going to copy the Souls’ series penchant for levers, they could at least copy the invulnerability frames you get as well.
This would perhaps be tolerable if it was limited to the campaign, but the fact that this lever-pulling is present in maps is utterly heinous.
If you’ve not played or watched Path of Exile, you won’t know what the hell a map even refers to, so the briefest primer: the endgame of PoE revolves around completing randomly generated levels with attributes controlled by the tiered consumable and upgradable items that generate them (waystones). Long story short, you might be running dozens of these things an hour, which is dozens of chances that you’re going to be getting the layout that includes the fucking levers.
I won’t go into detail on the many problems that endgame Path of Exile 2 has because I think a good chunk of casual players will never get that far, so here’s a quick blast of opinions for people “in the know”.
The 1 portal death punishment system is utterly ridiculous in a game where one-shots are not only common, but sometimes shockingly hard or impossible to see coming. Map layouts are frequently total ass, with the towers taking the crown of supreme shittiness for how painful it is to navigate, how it blocks minion pathfinding, and how generally unfun it is to actually fight within. Endgame crafting probably needs an entire post to itself, but it translates to an unsatisfying slot machine that doesn’t allow for any intelligence or decision-making, and collapses entirely into “run more maps, and slam more exalts into bases that you then immediately trash when they roll a single bad stat”.
Phew.
There are elements of its design that suggest GGG want it to be a slow-paced, methodical take on a Souls-ish APRG, but they’re hamstrung by parts of the game that still think they’re sitting in Path of Exile 1. If we’re meant to be slow, why are the maps massive and tedious? If skills are supposed to be high commitment, why are players so powerfully incentivised to utilise the handful of skills that aren’t, or the classes that avoid that problem altogether?
For me, the perfect example of this schizophrenia exists in the enemy design.
There’s many common mobs that are very slow, with massive telegraphed attacks that are clearly intended to be dodge-rolled or spaced, such as the statue-carrying zombies or halberd wielding death knights. These enemies are totally fine, great even, but the problem is they’re frequently mixed in with hordes of “classic ARPG” enemies that choke your screen with projectiles and their bodies, obscuring the rest.
The result of this is that if you’re playing slowly and “Soulsily”, you’ll be occasionally obliterated by one of these telegraphed attacks or ground effects that you just couldn’t see or feasibly dodge roll without eating shit from the massive horde of other enemies.
What’s the solution? Well, it’s where I ended up with my warrior when I reached tier 11-ish in maps and checked out: you make a build that atomic bombs the entire screen at range as quickly as possible with as few button presses as you can manage. The Soulsy-style enemies can’t hurt you if they’re immediately turned to ash the moment they come into range! Not a single grey cell in my brain was concerning itself with playing tactically around the unique moveset of those enemies. Hell, I might not have even been looking at my screen at the time.
The top build right now uses a single button, teleports at instant speed without a cooldown, and could probably be piloted by a dipping bird. The issue is not so much that this build exists, early access being what it is, but that the most encouraged method of handling the movesets and complexities of enemies is just to blow them all to pieces and ignore it.
Imagine if, instead of encouraging you to learn how to fight Ornstein & Smough and playing in a way that thematically appeals to you, Dark Souls instead pushed you into making a gimmicky low-health red tearstone ring build every time and one-shotting them. Then imagine it did this for every single boss, and instead of being “high risk, high reward”, was actually safer than any other build.
Tactics and moment-to-moment decisions be dashed, it turns out that this is just more map-blasting straight from the aged annals of PoE1.
Legacy players might be happy with that — though they’re likely pissed off at all the ways that GGG have attempted to dissuade them from that gameplay — but when the game ends up playing as a less content-dense, more aggravating PoE1 in the late game, and the justification for the sequel was that it was meant to play very differently from PoE1 regardless, it casts a question over the experience as a whole.
The reason for my cynicism, the reason why this game sits as a “maybe” with potential, is because I see Path of Exile 2 right now as “compromised”.
It doesn’t know what it is. That could feasibly change.
They could remove those sources of friction and frustration, and bring it closer to being “Path of Exile 1 but better looking with some quality of life”. A lot of the community would like that. Alternatively, they might actually buy into the Souls-like aspect, and remove those legacy hanger-on parts of the formula that really don’t fit. This would be the bolder decision, as it would leave the old game’s community behind.
The worst outcome would be to do nothing, to let it drift along as this “frustrating PoE, not great Souls-like” state as a game that people begrudgingly keep playing because it’s close to being something they would genuinely love. It’s sadly plausible to me that this is the outcome, as it feels the lowest risk; played by many, truly loved by no one.
Time will tell.