Path of Exile is a game I had watched extensively on Twitch before finally delving into it myself. The game launched clear back in 2013, and is relevant today. The graphical style pulled me in, the sound design was captivating and it just seemed so satisfying. Still, I kept away from it for some time mainly because of how complicated it looked. After finally giving it a go, although I do struggle, it is was well worth it.
Path of Exile is an action role-playing game from Grinding Gear Games. It is available, and free, on Xbox, PlayStation and PC. And for a free game, it has an enormous amount of depth. Randomly generated loot, levels and enemies, six starting classes each with their own massively branching skill trees which radically change your playing style, a myriad of ways to craft and a host of endgame content so significant many players say the game doesn’t start until endgame. There is a lot to keep you coming back to this game.
The crafting system is highly complex. Items you equip have gem slots. These can be altered, along with your equipment itself, by various types of orbs. When you fill a gem slot, it provides an active or passive ability which may pull from mana, which you have in addition to health and shields possible for either. These gems can be upgraded by being equipped, and you will find the gemstone abilities tie into skill tree advancements heavily. To the point, most players strongly urge looking into a character build guide BEFORE playing this game. I did not do this, and my experience was mixed in this regard.
I started as the “Witch” class and beat the game at level 69 out of 90. I died, I would guess, around a hundred times. The penalties for death are losing 10% of your current experience and having to respawn at a checkpoint or town. So, not the end of the world. Bosses will even stay at the health they were at when you come back, which means even though it might feel like it, nothing is unbeatable in this game.
My initial character build was centered around having minions fight for me. This means zombies, phantasms, a golem and a powerful skeleton army. By the end, I could have close to forty minions on the field, while I just ran around dodging attacks and casting the occasional fireball.
Even with this massive minion army and my fireballs, my survivability was ultimately not strong enough for endgame serious feasibility. This really disappointed me. I wanted to play endlessly. Looking into a build guide could’ve been a good idea had I known how much I was going to enjoy playing. For now, I will settle for starting a second character.
Be prepared to watch some videos or do some reading on this game if you decide to get into it. While the game itself is easy to consume say an hour at a time, (I did quite a bit more,) the background knowledge that will help you is immense. Path of Exile is all about minimizing your weaknesses and maximizing your strengths. Getting it right is highly rewarding, like everything in this game. Incredibly satisfying.
It has been a while since I have played a game this addicting. Path of Exile is very unique and sets itself apart with details. The story is dark and gothic, and takes you across 10 acts followed by the endless epilogue. It is average storytelling, but holds the game together well with riveting atmosphere. Even the music is engaging.
About every three months, GGG releases a new “League” that changes the game in some new way. These persist, so you can always check out old League stuff. Some of these are more interesting than others, what makes a lot of rewards, for anything, more interesting is that your stash persists between characters.
I imagine I will end up trying all the character types at some point. Once you know the story, this is a great game to listen to some music or a podcast while kicking back and enjoying. Most character builds are somewhat reductive, due to the min-maxing style, so you can really get into a groove and enjoy some hours of this game and let the time fly by.
Although Path of Exile is free to play, there are things you can pay for, and will want to for a couple reasons. First, the stash upgrades are huge for maintaining several characters. Second, you will just want to pay GGG for making this sublime game free to enjoy for all. Word is that not only is Path of Exile content going to keep coming, but a sequel may very well be in the early works. Exciting news to many who enjoy this game.
There is a wide community for this game. A random player offered a trade with me when I was an early Witch and gave me a rare chest item which bolstered me greatly without asking for anything in return. As I said, I frequent Twitch streams of the game and there is always some complete human almanac of this game in chat that can answer your question as well as any Google search. There is actually a great app many will recommend called Path of Building which will help you make build predictions and things like that, as well as trade sites where you can buy and sell items. Some of these items can be enormously helpful to gain if you are a serious player of this game.
For me, I will likely continue to enjoy making new builds in this game until I reach a point where I feel compelled to look into a build guide, which I just may do for one build I started but scrapped early when it became troublesome. It would really open up when I could use an advanced skill gem that is too high level right now. But, if you want a fantastic, deep, FREE action RPG look no further than Path of Exile.
HereticDerek 