Recent reviews by ChromeWing

F-Zero is that you?

A true mid-core ARPG. No softcore like Diablo 3 or 4, and no hardcore like Path of Exile. The perfect blend of both. No more having to settle for either extreme. This might actually be my new all time favorite.

Quite possibly my favorite game of the year. After playing the entire story, and with more endgame on the way, you can tell there's a lot of love put into this game. A few surprises near the end, fun attacks and abilities, and one of my new favorite upgrade systems with the glyphs. You level to 50 to get all your glyph slots and skill points, but there's unlimited levels after that to get beefier, and very high scaling endgame with more to come soon.

One of my favorite games of 2020. Still find myself playing it from time to time. Pretty addicting to optimize and hammer away at that blurple molasses.
Something I really appreciate is that the game doesn't feel that hard to beat (except one level). I don't consider myself an RTS expert, as I've only played a few of these games before. A lot of levels are very much possible to beat, although the procedural maps or user created ones can be tuned higher for difficulty. As a result, I am never too frustrated playing this game, and it can be very therapeutic to clean up the whole map!
This game recently had an experimental online multiplayer mode. The one time I tried it, it worked pretty flawlessly!

• Addicting singleplayer campaign that is similar to progression from the Tony Hawk games
  
• Played with friends, very fun and there's plenty of settings to play around with to tweak your playstyle
  
• The powerups add a lot of depth to the gameplay. Glide over cliffs, drive through fairways with the golf cart, sabotage your friends with brick walls or strong winds (negative powerups are togglable in the settings).

While there are a couple minor bugs (be careful not to land your ball on a wooden bridge), they might be fixed later on. There might be a couple things that aren't telegraphed really well, like how driving through sandtraps or rough grass will slow down and despawn your cart. I still had a blast playing this, definitely recommended for playing with friends!

After 500+ hours gametime (including playtime in the closed beta) ever since January 2013, I can share with you a pretty accurate review for those who want to start playing and aren't sure what to expect.

I'm not really a hardcore player myself, but I can give you a good look at how your experience will be if you don't quite view yourself as one either.

Also, with the newest free expansion coming out in July 2015, I'll take that into account in this review.

Starting out on the shores of Wraeclast:

Your first experience with PoE will most likely be a little slow at first (which is being sped up in the expansion along with other friendly changes), but as you continue playing you'll realize just how deep this game gets. Items in this game make up a large chunk of the game's content. Lots of things are itemized: gear, weapons, potions (or flasks), skills (called gems), even endgame maps are items with randomly generated stats on them that affect different builds in different ways. Skillgems are placed into your gear and weapons through sockets, and those sockets can have links, and those links allow you to link support gems which modify the connected skills, and sockets can have anywhere from 0 to 6 links... it's a mouthful, and the rest of the game is no different, but that's what I love about this game. There's much more than what I mentioned here that you can go find out for yourself if you're curious!

The flaws:

Like virtually any game out there, PoE has its flaws. It's just a matter of how many or how significant they are. One big one is Desync. It's a problem with their netcode that causes your character to move out of sync when walking through groups of mobs, especially through doorways. Thankfully, this problem has been fixed in the July 2015 expansion, called "The Awakening." Lockstep will be the method of choice that enables your character to move in the server before you see it on your screen, and with a decent latency (which will now be improved due to wider server coverage coming in the expansion), you won't really notice a thing.

Another flaw that still exists is an extremely deep gameplay that is so deep that it's exciting but also scary for new players to have to learn on their own. I'd recommend that if you're going into Path of Exile, the best opportunity is for someone who has already played a pretty long time to bring you in instead. They'll help you tons more than attempting to go alone.

Also, your first character WILL be your worst. It's virtually inevitable. The game's character build mechanics are so complex that it will take some time to know the ins and outs, but they are also so rewarding once you figure them out. My advice after playing for this amount of time is to get enough physical damage to convert it as extra elemental damage, and remember that "herald of X" skill gems and elemental damage are your friend. Also get a lot of life nodes on the MASSIVE passive skill tree as well as extra life and resistances on your gear, you need about 4k life (at least) and 75% resists by the time you reach endgame at level 66.


Why is this game worth playing?

This game will keep you busy for a LONG time. It's like an instanced MMO that you can delve into with a party of 6, farm zones and endgame for loot, and build many very unique characters with over 200 skill gems in the game and over 300 kinds of unique items, multiplied by the billions of randomly generated ones you could get. This is seriously like the WoW of ARPG's. I found myself playing this longer than I did with Diablo 3, and if you were a fan of D2 then GET THIS GAME. Don't forget that it's free to play, AND it's NOT pay to win. Chris Wilson is the head of the developers of Grinding Gear Games from New Zealand, and they made well sure that they appeal to the hardcore audience of ARPG's and deliver their own free to play game with only cosmetic effects from the shop, as well as account features like extra stash space and extra character slots (but you already start with 23 character slots, heh).

Get this game if you love ARPG's, especially Diablo games.

One last note, in 2013 when this game launched, GameSpot awarded it the PC 2013 game of the year. Following launch, they had 250k daily unique users log in. Every free expansion that they release usually twice a year brings the number closer to that amount again, and with The Awakening, I'm sure it will be near that once more.