Combat: It’s…Ok. Classic action RPG combat (don’t expect something inspired by the Souls-genre, like Moon Studios is trying to achieve with No Rest for the Wicked). Far slower than Path of Exile’s ridiculous “zoom zoom” combat, a bit slower than Diablo 3, faster (and less clunky) than Grim Dawn. There’s a satisfying feeling of impact when hitting enemies, and controls are very responsive. I only wish the monsters themselves were better designed – there’s no significant difference in the enemies we fight as far as their mechanics are concerned, there’s no kind of remarkable opponent other than a few act bosses, everything feels very similar. The result is that combat is very much the same no matter what we are fighting – no need to adapt strategies or change how we play at all.
Graphics: They’re also basically ok. A bit better than in Path of Exile, far better than Grim Dawn (which, let’s be honest, is an ugly old game), less cartoony than Diablo 3. If anything, the art style looks rather generic – the game reminds me more of Diablo Immortal than anything else. The visuals for skill effects, in other hand, are great – very impactful and colorful.
Soundtrack: Mediocre. This is one of the few things that Last Epoch does worse than Path of Exile. Other than a few tracks (such as the Main Theme), everything sounds more like white noise than real music. Completely forgetful.
Storyline & the Campaign: Trash. The story is almost nonsensical – there’s a gimmick about time travel, but it’s poorly implemented and the game ignores any deeper exploration of the concept (such as fate versus choice, if it’s possible to change the future, time paradoxes, etc). Even the name of the game makes no sense – the Epoch is a single time-travelling artifact, so saying it’s the “last” is the same as claiming that the Louvre Museum is the “last” Louvre.
Even worse, not only the story is bad, but it’s also poorly told. In the very first camp, there’s a quest marker to talk to an NPC. If you move past the NPC without talking to him (for, you know, exploring the camp), the quest automatically updates to the next step and you lose that dialogue. A bit later, there’s a conversation in which the player character tells an NPC about a piece of information that we were actually never told (how did our characters learn about that?). Some quests have broken dialogue – replies that makes no sense in the context of what is being said. Most NPCs don’t have dialogue updates when we move through quest states (which often means that a quest receiver will just repeat the quest acceptance dialogue over and over when being talked to), although a few randomly do, and it’s a challenge to figure out who are those exceptions. All NPCs have an in-game model and a portrait, but often the portrait doesn’t look anything like the in-game model (and appears extremely generic).
I think one of the most damning displays of how little the developers care about the storyline is how it ends – as the game was released, the story simply… Stops. There’s no ending, no conclusion to an arc, it simply stops with a promise of more being released later. Honestly, I doubt very much anyone cares.
The campaign itself, other than the storyline, is incredibly bland. The time travel gimmick means that we play through four different time periods, but three of those are very limited (have basically a single enemy faction and one kind of environment). The game is way too easy while levelling, with only a few unique bosses here and there, and even those are basically “the ground is lava”, as popularized by MMORPGs. Exploration is pointless – Last Epoch has the same style of fixed maps that Grim Dawn uses, but while the latter does so in order to have significant secrets and rewards for exploration, Last Epoch has… Nothing. There’s no point in going off the beaten path or doing anything other than travelling to the next quest marker as directly as possible.
Endgame: There are three endgame systems: the Monolith, the main endgame - basically a succession of very small maps that boils down to “kill stuff quickly, get items, repeat” as fast as you can. The dungeons, each with unique rewards and a unique mechanic, culminating in a somewhat involved boss fight. And the arena, in which we fight waves of monsters; this one is pointless. The endgame modes can be accessed by a low-level character, which somewhat allows a player to skip parts of the campaign, but they’re very simple and bland – dungeons are more unique, but the other two modes are just repetitions of the same combat system we see in the campaign.
Character development: Each character has a passive skill tree, similar to the one in Grim Dawn (moving horizontally with a main Mastery bar guiding progress) but far more complex; while most are filled with boring “+x% to stats” upgrades, they do allow some interesting synergies occasionally (far less than in Path of Exile, but then again this is a much simpler system).
But, one of the most unique aspects of Last Epoch is that each and every skill has an entire skill tree – and while all of them have some of the inevitable “+x stats” nodes, they all have multiple ways to deeply modify and customize how the skills work. This is a far more comprehensive system than the one in Grim Dawn, more tailored than the one in Path of Exile (since each skill has its individual and unique tree, as opposed to many skills sharing the same support skills in PoE), and deeper than the one in Diablo 3. While there are a few nuisances in this system (each character has access to less skills than GD or PoE, and the respect system is annoying), it’s one of the things Last Epoch does really well.
The last layer of customization are the Masteries – “subprofessions” for each of the 5 main classes. Some are clearly been than others – the Mage class, for example, has the Sorcerer mastery (which is a mage focusing on area of effect skills, but the base mage class already is about AoE, so what’s the point?), the Spellblade (a mage using mostly melee spells) and the Runemaster – in which casting an elemental skill creates a rune, and up to three runes can be stored. Upon activating the mastery’s signature skill, a spell will be cast based on which runes the character has; and with forty possible rune combinations, that’s 40 extra spells available. Clearly this mastery had a more thoughtful design than the other two.
Itemization & Crafting: The crafting system in Last Epoch is very good – items can be destroyed to create shards with their affixes, which can then be somewhat deterministically used to upgrade other items. This means that every item has a chance of being useful – even if it’s an item type you don’t want, it may have good affixes. While crafting has a small degree of randomness, it’s far less than the “lottery that players are meant to lose” crafting system of Path of Exile, and far more versatile than Diablo 3’s system.
It’s a pity that the items themselves are so bland. While there are no overly specific item affixes (like “extra damage to burning enemies who are frozen”), and there are few useless affixes, almost all modifiers we can find in items are, well, boring – the usual of extra armor, extra health, resistance to specific damage types, etc. The most interesting affixes are those that increase the level of skills, but even there the real interesting thing is the skill system, not the items themselves.
I do need to talk about the trading system – or lack of. If you want, you can play online and join an in-game faction that allows you to trade (good luck enjoying an online economy – it has already been wrecked by exploits, as expected). But if you don’t, or if you play offline (and really, you should play offline), you can join another faction that actually gives you benefits for playing in a “self-found” mode. This is, IMO, a great way to deal with the divide between those who want to trade and those who don’t – completely the opposite of Path of Exile’s approach to SSF.
Community: Avoid. Not as bad as Path of Exile’s community, but still with too many people that take any kind of feedback about the game personally and refuse to see how it could be improved. The community is also far less useful than PoE’s one – there are significantly less community tools for Last Epoch than for Path of Exile or Grim Dawn.
Conclusion: How much you will enjoy Last Epoch depends entirely of how much you enjoy its combat system – because that’s pretty much the only good kind of content the game has to offer. Character customization and item crafting are interesting and have a lot of potential, but without further content in which to use those systems, just killing generic enemies in generic maps over and over again gets boring fast.
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