Playing Grim Dawn in preparation for the new expansion, Forgotten Gods, that gonna be released later this year, generally, I'm not a fan of ARPGs, mostly because they demand a brutal time commitment before delivering on the goods, and on Grim Dawn case, the base game has some issues like many areas on the game don't being artistically diverse enough but after playing Ashes of Malmouth, the first expansion, I felt the expansion was really well done and a step up from the base game on a major way.
Really liked the new areas on the last expansion with the lore of people made mad by evil spirits of the forest, slowly turning them on cannibals and eventually anthropomorphic monsters with beast heads, witches on their covenant help you out and a final boss very Tzimisce inspired, the Shaper of Flesh. Not that the expansion is perfect, the last area, is a big disappointment in comparison with the swamp being yet another city on ruins.
It remains an ARPG though, with that nonsense of having to play the game three times to actually get cool loot included but they added alot of new content over the years and once you get high level and start trying out the higher level loot and having shit exploding everywhere is really fun, the problem is to withstand the tedium to get there...
To be honest, the only thing that doesn't make me give up because of the huge waste of time leveling up characters is that I REALLY like the setting and the meaty combat sound effects with the shaking screen on explosions make me distracted enough from the fact that I'm just killing the same monsters over and over.
The lore behind the game is very derivative but the way they set up things is very clever actually with even the evil monsters having an understandable motivation and actions that made sense that goes beyond MUHAWWWW, I"M EVIL, that generic fantasy is so fucking guilt of, just look to Diablo 3 and see a prime example of how NOT to make a setting and story, it is pretty decent dark fantasy that unfortunately is mostly told through lore texts as you are too busy killing stuff for serious RPG stuff.
Anyway, it is pretty cool for an ARPG, not as pretty as Wolcen or as content packed as Path of Exile and Warframe and their endless expansions but it has a pretty cool setting and a decently done loot treadmill and character theorycrafting that can keep you going and is certainly better than diarrhea like Diablo 3, just wished those developers came up with a better idea than forcing you to replay the same content 100 times if you want to try builds up.
