izigame.me

Grim dawn is a hack and slash game. There are a lot of classes, and you will get your second class early on. This dual class system opens up the possibility for a lot of builds. I had to play with 5 characters in parallel, to experience all the possible classes, and what synergies the class pairs had. In this way, the game was almost 5 times longer than I wanted it to be. Almost, because after the main game, half of my characters did one of the story DLC, the other half the other one. Eventually I completed the DLCs only with one character.

The combat varies by classes. Generally you will want to focus on a few key skills. Leveling up characters is tricky. I didn’t realize that first you have to extend the bottom level till the end for your main class, and to the length of useful skills for the build in the other class (which varied from 0 to full 50 depending on my build). While doing this, it is enough to put only 1 in the skills you are interested in. The game can be completed in normal mode with only 1 in your skills (though a few increase by +1 items for class skills makes thing easier). As for leveling up attributes, there is really only one choice : physics. Only put attribute points in other ones if you really know what you are doing. Respeccing your skills is virtually free, and in the DLCs you get quest rewards early on allowing to reset your attributes or devotions.

The inventory system is a bit barebone. You will unlock additional inventory slots through progressing through the main storyline of the base game. There will be tons of loot, and most of it will be junk – but you still have to scan through all of its numerous attributes, should some be relevant. Having 5 characters at least offered a chance to use some drops that were meant for those class combinations. I ended up installing Rainbow filter mod for the game, which at least made scanning through the lengthy list of attributes a bit easier. An update to the game broke the mod somewhat, but was still usable, so I decided to use it that way, without checking for updates to it. Speaking of updates, Grim dawn changed quite a bit from its initial version. By the time I installed it, all the classes had evade dash (wasn’t so at release), all had infinite health and mana pots on a cooldown (I think those used to be in the inventory, but without or much less cooldown), and the passive skills reserved mana, instead of being triggered by the user.

The enemies will scale with you, but there are upper limits for some zones. For example, even if you return as a level 50 character to the starting zone, the enemies will be still level 15. There is some crafting in the game, but it can be ignored in normal mode. If you start the game on Elite, you will preserve your previous gear and build, but the enemies will be scaled to you, even in the starter zones. On Ultimate, as far as I could tell mostly just your resistances were decreased severely. There are several modes in the game. You start in normal mode – that is in easy mode. Unlocking further difficulties require that you first beat the base game. But there is a switch named veteran mode. That can be switched on as you wish for normal mode from the main menu. It will greatly increase the health of enemies, and generally makes the game harder. Once you start oneshotting / mawing through maps, you will want to switch it on for a bit of a challenge.

The save system of the game is – well non existent. As far as I know, if I log out, I will log back at the safe zone I started from, with all my loot in my inventory, and with all my progress. No quick save, no save slots. You might wonder what happens if you die on the map. Nothing really, you just respawn in a safe zone, with a bit of experience lost. Retracing to your place of death will even restore that XP, not that it matters much.

One neat, and little known feature of the game is the textual filter. At the devotion map, or at the blacksmith, you can write in filter terms, and the relevant items will be highlighted / appear in a list. So for example if you are doing a pet build, type in pet on the devotion screen, and you will see what nodes have that. Or you could try cold, life, dual, whatever your build needs. Similarly, at the blacksmith you can filter for fire related enchantments for example.

The quest system in the game is atrocious for one reason : there is no quest marker for the destination. Technically, when you get close enough you will see a star icon on the minimap. But how to know where is approximately the quest target on a large map? You don’t. If lucky, there is a textual reference, like south of this location. But even that could mean you must go to an entire different map, which is a bit south of that location (but not reachable from there). Countless times I ended up roaming randomly on maps, hoping to uncover a side quests location. Even looking up online won’t always help : some quests can have multiple possible locations, chosen randomly. It got to the point that I didn’t even bother with the repeatable faction quests : if I cannot find the destination, running around like a headless chicken or browsing the net for solutions is the opposite of fun. To add insult to injury, if you accept a quest (repeatable ones too), it will stay forever in your quest log, you cannot even abandon it. My right screen was choke full of such accumulated quests I had no idea where to go for.

I played the game with mouse and keyboard only. It offered a much greater precision in aiming and / or movement.

I bought the game of the year edition, which means I got 3 DLCs. Lets start with the most boring one for me. The crucible adds small arenas to the game, where you will fight through 10 waves of automatically spawning enemies. After every 10 wave, you can choose to continue, or get your rewards. There won’t be loot dropped, and you will get your XP at the end of the waves. The loot reward when you chose to leave is pathetic, and so is the XP reward. It is really meant for people who want to challenge themselves, to prove that they survive against ever increasing odds. As such, I didn’t play it much, but the more competitive souls might find it entertaining. But it offers an easy access to the shared bank, good for new characters or if you just want to shuffle stuff between multiple characters in a convenient way.

Ashes of Malmouth is the first expansion, and a direct continuation of the storyline. You can access it after finishing the base game. The maps have greater attention to graphics, and you continue with the main storyline. Most of the enemies will be of new types, some with noticeably new mechanincs compared to the base game – like the acid shooting flowers, where you have time to dodge / walk out from their attacks, but you must pay attention for that during the fight. If you liked the base game, you will like it too. Though on the stairs in the final zone I got stuck quite a lot with my default continuous mouse press movement.

Forgotten gods is set in a desert environment, with a completely different lore from Grim dawn. After the lush environment of Ashes of Malmouth, the desert ones felt a bit underwhelming. You are free to teleport between this zone, and the earlier ones already unlocked. As a bonus, this DLC offers the chance to transfer money between your characters (you couldn’t do that directly prior to this). And there will be an alternative to the crucible. This time you can explore randomly selected mini dungeons. The main difference with the crucible is that the enemies are already spread out in the dungeon, there won’t be spawning waves. I liked it much better than the elitist crucible, here you can progress at your own pace. There is a reward if you are fast, but that is optional. Also, by the end of the DLC I got a Mysterious orb. Seemingly a rare drop for merely 200 hours, it is a minipet.

The game was stable, it didn’t crash for me.