Grim Dawn Ranking: B
Here’s another game vying for the “spiritual successor to Diablo” title. It’s not a bad game, but certain aspects really stood out to me, so I’ll go over those first.
Let’s start with the story and plot. It’s pretty bare-bones – these green undead-Zerg hybrids called Aetherials have invaded the world and pretty much won. I call them undead-Zerg hybrids because they can possess people, create weird monstrous organisms, and raise the dead. At any rate, they’re fighting a group that worships Ch’thon, who is kind of like Khorne the blood god from Warhammer. That’s about all the game tells you about these guys. I get what they were trying to convey – the apocalypse has already happened and nobody really cares about more detailed backstory behind the ones responsible, as everyone’s just trying to survive. But to me, a lore guy, it made me really detached from all the guys I was killing. “Oh, hey, there’re some more generic green zombies that I’m going to set on fire and they’re fighting nondescript creepy cultists with blood magic” was more or less my attitude the entire time.
Oh, and by the way, iron is the currency in this game…which I find idiotic because iron is a terrible currency. It rusts. Don’t people think they’ve got enough problems without also having to worry about tetanus when making transactions? And even if they think iron is more practically useful compared to gold, rusted iron isn’t going to get you very far. </tongue_in_cheek_nitpick_rant>
…Anyway…next: the level design irks me. A lot. Imagine a network of rooms, like the catacombs at the end of Act 1 in Diablo II. But while the rooms were interconnected in Diablo II, here every room has only one usable entrance and one usable exit. Any path beyond that is invariably blocked by rubble or burning debris or some other doodad. Such a map only has 1 main direction to go, meaning if I ever need to backtrack, I’m going to have to traverse the entire map. It sounds trivial, but I got annoyed by this feature really fast.
Third, the game has level scaling, which I hate in general, but here it makes even less sense as there are the 3 traditional difficulties. What’s the point of having multiple difficulties if Normal scales all the way to level 60? Especially when the level cap is 85.
As a side note, I hate the 3 traditional difficulties. You basically have to repeat the game (twice) to develop your character, which isn’t great design.
Finally…let’s talk about the roguelike dungeons. You need a special crafted key to enter and then you either need to complete the entire dungeon or die trying. You can’t portal out. Your inventory will quickly fill with items and the game will happily stick a merchant in the dungeon somewhere that you specifically cannot sell items to. These dungeons quickly become long time-sinks and the final bosses are incredibly difficult.
Now despite these gripes, I say Grim Dawn is a good game. The plot is skeletal, but the developers did a great job conveying that this world has gone to hell in a handbasket. I found these journal entries about a refugee who dealt with impending starvation by offering his 9-year-old daughter to other men and then killing/eating them when they arrived to pick her up. It’s some messed-up stuff. The linearity and level scaling are annoying, but those are pretty minor issues. And finally, those roguelike dungeons – they’re optional. You get achievements and loot upon completing them, and that’s it. I gave Path of Exile a lot of shit over this sort of thing, but that’s because the corresponding dungeon was pretty much mandatory over there. Here? Optional. Completely optional.
Grim Dawn also affords the player a surprisingly large amount of meaningful choice. You choose between factions or NPCs and the world responds in kind. You complete a quest from a soldier who wants you to recover some cannons and extra cannons appear on the walls. You kill a thug extorting a village and that village gets torched by the thug’s boss. If you wait until after you’ve dealt with the gang boss to deal with the thug, the village survives.
Here’s a screenshot of my second character after beating the (base) game on Elite. My first character had a terrible build and I struggled a lot, but this one had almost no trouble through Normal, struggled a lot at the beginning of Elite, then facetanked her way to the end of Elite. The last boss on Elite with its infinite adds (sigh) was a slog, though.
Here’s another game vying for the “spiritual successor to Diablo” title. It’s not a bad game, but certain aspects really stood out to me, so I’ll go over those first.
Let’s start with the story and plot. It’s pretty bare-bones – these green undead-Zerg hybrids called Aetherials have invaded the world and pretty much won. I call them undead-Zerg hybrids because they can possess people, create weird monstrous organisms, and raise the dead. At any rate, they’re fighting a group that worships Ch’thon, who is kind of like Khorne the blood god from Warhammer. That’s about all the game tells you about these guys. I get what they were trying to convey – the apocalypse has already happened and nobody really cares about more detailed backstory behind the ones responsible, as everyone’s just trying to survive. But to me, a lore guy, it made me really detached from all the guys I was killing. “Oh, hey, there’re some more generic green zombies that I’m going to set on fire and they’re fighting nondescript creepy cultists with blood magic” was more or less my attitude the entire time.
Oh, and by the way, iron is the currency in this game…which I find idiotic because iron is a terrible currency. It rusts. Don’t people think they’ve got enough problems without also having to worry about tetanus when making transactions? And even if they think iron is more practically useful compared to gold, rusted iron isn’t going to get you very far. </tongue_in_cheek_nitpick_rant>
…Anyway…next: the level design irks me. A lot. Imagine a network of rooms, like the catacombs at the end of Act 1 in Diablo II. But while the rooms were interconnected in Diablo II, here every room has only one usable entrance and one usable exit. Any path beyond that is invariably blocked by rubble or burning debris or some other doodad. Such a map only has 1 main direction to go, meaning if I ever need to backtrack, I’m going to have to traverse the entire map. It sounds trivial, but I got annoyed by this feature really fast.
Third, the game has level scaling, which I hate in general, but here it makes even less sense as there are the 3 traditional difficulties. What’s the point of having multiple difficulties if Normal scales all the way to level 60? Especially when the level cap is 85.
As a side note, I hate the 3 traditional difficulties. You basically have to repeat the game (twice) to develop your character, which isn’t great design.
Finally…let’s talk about the roguelike dungeons. You need a special crafted key to enter and then you either need to complete the entire dungeon or die trying. You can’t portal out. Your inventory will quickly fill with items and the game will happily stick a merchant in the dungeon somewhere that you specifically cannot sell items to. These dungeons quickly become long time-sinks and the final bosses are incredibly difficult.
Now despite these gripes, I say Grim Dawn is a good game. The plot is skeletal, but the developers did a great job conveying that this world has gone to hell in a handbasket. I found these journal entries about a refugee who dealt with impending starvation by offering his 9-year-old daughter to other men and then killing/eating them when they arrived to pick her up. It’s some messed-up stuff. The linearity and level scaling are annoying, but those are pretty minor issues. And finally, those roguelike dungeons – they’re optional. You get achievements and loot upon completing them, and that’s it. I gave Path of Exile a lot of shit over this sort of thing, but that’s because the corresponding dungeon was pretty much mandatory over there. Here? Optional. Completely optional.
Grim Dawn also affords the player a surprisingly large amount of meaningful choice. You choose between factions or NPCs and the world responds in kind. You complete a quest from a soldier who wants you to recover some cannons and extra cannons appear on the walls. You kill a thug extorting a village and that village gets torched by the thug’s boss. If you wait until after you’ve dealt with the gang boss to deal with the thug, the village survives.
Here’s a screenshot of my second character after beating the (base) game on Elite. My first character had a terrible build and I struggled a lot, but this one had almost no trouble through Normal, struggled a lot at the beginning of Elite, then facetanked her way to the end of Elite. The last boss on Elite with its infinite adds (sigh) was a slog, though.
Final verdict: does this game live up to Diablo? No. Should you still play it? Yeah, sure.