Last Epoch
Last Epoch is a great ARPG. I really enjoyed playing different classes and coming up with fun builds. I guess depending on why you play games like this, the one piece of advice I'd give is to look at all the skill trees and work out what playstyle and build you want to go with on your own. As soon as I started looking at guides and character guides I totally lost interest. The fun for me is working that stuff out, rather than just copy-pasting someone else's ideas.
Pros
- Pretty background scenery
- Nice background music
- Voiced characters
- Town portals
- Short loading screens
- 15 different classes (5 archetypes each with 3 specializations)
- Skill descriptions are clear and tell you EXACTLY what they do, how they scale and related to other abilities. Serious kudos for actually putting the thought into doing that.
- There's a really detailed system for filters for how loot appears when it drops. So you can change the colours of loot based on stats you want, rather than rarity
- On top of the classes, you can choose to specialise in any skill in the game. Every skill has it's own talent tree - and they often change how they work quite significantly. So if you like Disintegration Beam, you can convert it's damage type, change the range, make it shoot multiple beams etc
- Has a searchable in-game guide for all game mechanics
Cons
- No Steam achievements
- As with basically all ARPGs I've ever played, it's too zoomed in. I want to see more of what's around me
- You only every have 4 skills on the action bar. This is limiting and makes it feel like a console game.
- Can't rotate the camera
- Cosmetics shop
- Although you can respec skills, it just removes points but you don't get them back, so you have to level up the skill again. While I understand the reasoning behind this, it means you need to plan the whole build in advance because undoing anything is time consuming
- Adding multiplayer delayed the game by at least a year
- There are spelling and grammar mistakes in 1.0
- Even after 1.0 launch, there are still notices like "Some skills do not have an augment tree avilable yet" (yes, the spelling mistake is in the game too)
- If you teleport back to town, when you come back - the map has all been hidden again, all the enemies (including bosses) have respawned, and all your summons disappear.
- Respeccing a skill to try out new builds means losing the skill and having to level it up again, which is extremely time consuming and deters from experimenting
- Although a lot of the spell descriptions are pretty useful, basic mechanics like "does shock on hit apply to spells" "is damage over time the same as channeling" I had to do a lot of googling for
- Many of the dialogue responses just don't make any sense. Like you make a statement about something or ask a question, and the NPC just talks about something else, as if they originally only had one dialogue tree, then added extra player responses, but never updated the NPC end
- Multiple cutscenes have no audio