Path of Exile 2 Review (Mort)
TLDR
The Good -
The campaign story is fun and interesting
The boss fights are a lot of fun
The artwork and visual effects are gorgeous
The skill tree offers a lot of flexibility pre-endgame
The Bad -
The game design has no respect for your time once you reach the endgame
The punishment for death past 70 costs you exponentially more of your time the higher your level
Ascensions are boring and can cost you hours of your time
Ascensions should be something that supports and helps enable your progress through the game but currently it is the opposite
The gameplay past the campaign is a stale grind
Crafting is a joke and not worth your time unless you just really enjoy gambling your resources
The economy is awful and seems to show no signs of improving
The marketplace requires that you buy a special inventory tab in order to post items for sale
The marketplace system can be a massive time sink when trying to make a purchase
Unique items are 99% garbage but they will sell you a tab for real money to “collect” them in
Cosmetics cost more than a new outfit in real life
The game design is rife with mechanics that encourage the player to spend money on inventory and then hinder the player if they choose not to do so
Endgame builds are not as flexible and interesting as they could be and you wind up cornered into a few select options if you wish to clear maps quickly which is literally all the endgame is
I really enjoyed the campaign gameplay, story and the flexibility of how I could build my characters. This continued until around level 70 when I finished the last of the campaign and started the mapping grind. Once I started the endgame grind I figured this would be when I started being able to really min/max my character, experiment with builds and really dial things in gear-wise. Sadly this was not the case, instead I started to discover just how many little (and sometimes not so little) time sinks have been designed into the game. Everything, inventory management, UI/UX design, buying/selling items, building up enough currency to buy items, finding citadels on the map, literally every aspect of the game’s design is engineered to hold your time hostage and then for some of it they offer to ransom it back to you for real money. Some will argue that you can play the game without spending a penny and they would be right, you can. However the game is specifically designed to make that choice hamper your gameplay in every respect.
Beyond the design elements that attempt to ransom your time back to you there are elements that just unapologetically thumb their nose at it. For example player deaths and the 10% XP loss. At level 70 this is no big deal and you won’t think much of it. Once you reach the upper 80s and into the 90s you are going to start losing hours and hours of gameplay and it just gets exponentially worse. For me this was most common when mapping with friends and 9 times out of 10 I wouldn’t even be able to see what killed me and maxing out resists does not guarantee you won’t still get one shot by something you never even saw coming. The level of visual noise is so incredibly high that it just isn’t possible to see everything that could kill you. I can live with it when it is my mistake and I just got lax. When the player is not given the opportunity to try and avoid it then it becomes a design flaw.
Player to player item sales early on were ok, it was quick, efficient and most players were polite enough to let you know if the item you DMed them about was currently being sold so you didn’t waste your time waiting on them to respond. Over time a shift took place and people stopped communicating and the process became a lot of refreshing the page waiting for the market to update so you could see if they sold the item to someone else. Instead of being able to just pay an intermediary system this system requires the player to be online, it requires the player to stop what they are doing to meet up and it requires that you don’t miss a message in your chat log which is very easy to do when mapping. It seems like it was perhaps designed to push players to engage with each other but unfortunately it winds up being just as impersonal as an automated marketplace and far less efficient. It even goes so far as to clash with mapping mechanics. When you generate a map with a waystone you get a limited number of portals to access the map. Every time you leave the map and go back it consumes a portal. Due to limited inventory space it is very easy to consume most or all of your portals just retrieving loot. Leaving a map to meet with a player and sell an item will consume one of these portals making it the wise choice to finish the map first which can often result in a missed opportunity to sell something as the buyer often hedges their bets by DMing multiple sellers with similar items.
Ascension trials are terrible. Period. The honor mechanic in Sekhemas punishes melee classes while making it easy by comparison if you are ranged. Trial of Chaos will often present you with such terrible debuff options that synergize with each other so strongly you can wind up forced into an unbeatable trial. It should always be possible to get through it! This is another place where the game can completely waste your time and provides absolute nothing but frustration in return.
The list of problems this game has goes on but I’ll just conclude by saying that if you value your time and don’t want to invest in a game that has no respect for the limited time we all have on this earth then look elsewhere for your entertainment.