PathOfExile

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Really freakin blatant Diablo2 clone in which you kill groups of monsters (including ones that spawn others, things that explode on death and things that grant aura buffs to their neighbours) collect items (which start off unidentified and quickly become "just ignore it it won't be useful" - because argh inventory tetris!) release ancient evil because, uh, a tooltip told you to; and "Don't be so bloody stupid" isn't an option, and then slay it.

It is somewhat annoyingly always-online only, because it has mmo pretensions; despite having no built in way to trade, and only a half-baked grouping interface.

It's famous for having a ridiculous levelling schema. This mostly boils down to "Wow, that's intimidating; where's intimidating. Where's a guide? Ok, now where's a guide that is even slightly related to the way the tree looks today?" and seems to have junked its previous idea of 'keystones' that lock parts of the scheme away behind big changes (like, say "You have exactly 1 health but ignore this damage type completely"). Those are now all at the periphery and very optional.

But it's all good mindless fun. And it's got some nice tweaks and some bits of unintentional humour. (I particularly like the corpse-eating birds in the garden level filled with animated statues; and the peacock-skumnk-porcupine hybrid chimera.) Even if for the most part it's "Quick! Click it!" and stuff blows up before you can even find out what its official name was.

And this category of games really needs to fix the tempo of "Explore, kill, explore... Boss fight! Uh, crap, screen clutterred with crap. Loot, town, sell, return, loot repeat that a couple of times. Ok, where was I? Um, right - explore.. plot!" Completely destroys the flow. And plot items that consume your (annoyingly limited) inventory space? Definitely destroys the joy of finding the ultimate artifact you need to destroy the ancient evil when you realise that you have to carry the bloody thing through 3 more maps it'll make you return to town to sell stuff about twice as often.

Vitenka is playing a Ranger, and gives it a Rico score of 1.

CategoryComputerGames