Grim Dawn Preview
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It's extremely dark and bleak environments at first can look a little primitive, but you quickly realise the detail comes with study. Much has been done to the old Titan Quest engine, not least freeing the camera to rotate on the X axis, and you don't need frills when it's serious business. So you really already know what to expect: A Tetris inventory attached to a character sheet of square slots, basic stats embellished by a sprawling choice of skills, and hundreds and hundreds of monsters to left and right click all over.
Structurally, there really are no surprises. Portals take you back to town, inventories get bursting full with items incrementally better or poorer than those you're currently using, combinable gems to slot into weapons and armour, and everything else you might expect. And blimey, that's always a pleasure.
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My experience with the Soldier class offered alongside Demolitionist and Occultist was so difficult that I eventually restarted, going for the more mixed abilities of the Demolitionist. Soldiers should really be the tank character, but he was very weak against larger gangs of enemies (and you can be fighting upward of fifteen at a time), with no ranged abilities of much use. You can, after level 10, mix in another class, but even the Demo ability I picked was still not enough to stay alive quite long enough at this point. Restarting with the Demo, I've had a much better time, although again around the level 10 mark the difficulty really kicked in. Get to 12, however, and suddenly things even out again.
Not that it's a bad thing, of course an ARPG can be a tedious affair if there's no challenge, and Grim is obviously aiming to be on the much tougher end of that spectrum. But there's a line between high difficulty, and not having enough fun, and with the Soldier at this point I was dying so frequently that the repeated runs from the last rift gate became pretty frustrating. And that's furthered by the slow addition of new skills. It would seem ideal if you were adding your third ability to your roster by level 10, rather than 12-13, but unless you've left your current skills extremely underpowered, you're not there yet. It's not a huge deal it's only another 45 minutes play but spikes like that can need smoothing out.
