The state of action RPGs is such that your choice is “Get a Ph.D. in Path of Exile until Path of Exile 2 comes out” or endure the fact that Diablo 4 exists–and remember, I kept playing Diablo 4 even while we called it one of our biggest disappointments–and wait for Path of Exile 2. But what if…oh, compromise is dead in America, but what if there was an option between “The Content Delivery Platform Game As Service Microtransaction Content Hellscape” and “It will take 400 hours to build a character without guides”? A reasonable adult compromise of clicking monsters, getting gear, and having a good time that isn’t Old (sorry, Grim Dawn and TitanQuest). Well, friends, a Kickstarter game has actually come out (I know!), and…it’s pretty good (I KNOW!).

Last Epoch
Developer: Eleventh Hour Games
Price: $34.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review

Last Epoch is one of those games that is not innovative or cutting-edge and that is a goddamn relief. Instead, it is simply a good example of a good game that was made by people who like games and would like you to play their games, not executives trying to maximize the revenue they take out of your pocket or optimize how much time you spend online. For example, there are cosmetic-only microtransactions, but you simply buy the game and have access to it, and you can buy some better versions if you want some fancier cosmetics and soundtracks. That’s it. 

It’s set in a fantasy world where…uh, look, frankly, I don’t know what’s going on in the story at all, and I don’t know if I just don’t get it (possible, I am very stupid) or it’s not told very well, but something something, the timeline is shattered and you are trying to help or something. However, this means you are hopping back and forth through time and space, fighting everything from demons to void creatures to dinosaurs to skeletons to plant monsters to…look, you know how in Diablo 4, there were like 5 enemies? This is the opposite of that. This is more like, you know, you charge onto a map and fight some giant spiders and some ungodly void monstrosities and then some skeletons and then jump back in time and fight a walking plant but also a dragon and a velociraptor. Like I said, this feels like it was made by people who like games rather than Optimized Content Delivery Platforms to Meet Aggressive Timelines and Deliver Shareholder Value, so that is an upside. 

The classes are absolutely fascinating because they seem like they are going to be pretty standard. You’ve got your Mage and Rogue (what it says on the tin); your Sentinel (big armored guy); Acolyte (spooky magic!); and Primalist (druid/shaman-ish)…but where it gets interesting is all the things they can do. You pick your subclass around level 20 after completing a quest, and each class has 3 of those, but there are also a variety of skills under each base class heading. I’m not going to break it all down, but let me give you some flavor. This is when I turn my hat backwards and sit on my chair backwards so you know we’re “rapping” and getting “real.”

I made a Mage and then specialized as a Sorcerer. This is your pretty classic spellcaster: He shoots lightning and cold and fire and whatnot. Okay. But! There’s a lot of different ways to tweak and specialize that in the skill trees. For example, I really liked using lightning, so I focused on a Chain Lightning-style build that made my lightning skills bounce all around…but then I picked up a skill that turned my Lightning damage into cold damage, so I was shooting chain “lightning” that was actually freezing monsters with giant bouncing bolts of…frost damage that acted like lightning. 

The risk with this is you go the Path of Exile route where everything is incredibly complicated or, on the other hand, the Diablo 4 route where all the rough edges are sanded down and you have to min-max, so there are 40 different skills but only 5 are actually worth using, but Last Epoch…doesn’t do either. Everything is pretty clearly explained and the mechanics all make sense. When I wasn’t doing enough damage, I looked for gear to boost that kind of damage. When I seemed to get killed a lot, I looked for skills or items that buffed my defense or hit points. I never felt the need to check a build guide or min-max. While I am 10,000% sure you can and should do that on the high end, there was plenty of room for just grabbing what was cool and useful along the way, and respecs were easy (and weren’t yet another microtransaction). 

Which is when I’ll talk about another Mage: I thought it might be pretty cool to go another route and decided on a melee-mage build. I did this because I kept noticing cool items dropping that seemed statted that way and also because Spellblade is another Mage-based class that’s meant for that, so I rolled an alt (I am the person who fills all his character slots, yes), and started experimenting. While my Sorcerer was all about staying at a distance and raining down meteors and shooting lightning, my budding Spellblade was all about charging into the fight and walloping monsters with melee weapons and supplementing that with magic spells. This required a completely different spell selection and itemization and…I didn’t have to check a site or Tier List or optimize anything, I simply picked items that seemed useful, used some twink items I’d stashed (remember twinking?) to help him along, and got going pretty quickly. Like I said, this feels like a game made by people who want you to play and have a good time and roll lots of alts and tinker with builds and items, not “check a Tier list for the 3 good builds and roll one of those.” Similarly, the Rogue class supports your classic “melee rogue” and “ranged rogue”, but also the “Falconer”, which “has a goddamn Falcon”. The class design is a truly impressive blend of playstyles, replayability, and diversity…but it’s all easily understood and you can have a good time just doing what looks cool and feels fun. 

Likewise, crafting isn’t something I care much about but…crafting is actually fun in this because it’s pretty easy to understand. Most items have “Crafting Potential”, which is basically how much you can do with it, and you pick up various items which, well, think of them as the adjectives that apply various effects to the items. You open the Forge, see how many slots an item has, start slapping adjectives on it, and then it gives you an idea if you can do what you want. That’s pretty much it. Usually, I’d find gear I liked, then add a couple of things to it in crafting to make it fit, the way you’d have a suit tailored to fit. 

There are some downsides to a small studio making a Kickstarter game: Loading times between areas are still long; there aren’t a ton of social features like guilds and such yet; there aren’t much in terms of character gender and customization options and that sort of thing. The upside to it not being a Live Service Microtransaction Hell, though, is there are things like an offline mode, the maps are fun to explore and poke around, the world is colorful and lovely and weird, and you can experiment and screw around because all the fun and janky things haven’t been mercilessly optimized away to maximize metrics.

And while I don’t know if I really got the storyline, I did enjoy it, because what I took from it was, basically, time has been shattered and people are trying to help, but every time they do, they just make things worse. There are many quests that are basically “Help these people try to fix things,” then you do, then the quest text changes to “Oh god, no, they managed to summon some kind of terrible horror from the nether, kill it before it gets loose. Everyone’s an idiot and things just keep getting worse.” No major studio would try that, it would lose them key happiness points in the teenage demo, but it did make me laugh. 

The Final Word
Finally, a good action RPG 

– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good

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• Source: https://monstervine.com/2024/03/last-epoch-review-an-epoch-win/