Grim Dawn

 

Grim Dawn is frequently mentioned alongside the top ARPGS, and just glancing at screenshots it takes place in this sort of 18th century Gothic world which alone makes it stand out a bit. It has full co-op so thats another big reason I wanted to try it. The game is made by Titan Quest devs and uses the same engine and loosely similar systems and gameplay. So much so that after playing for awhile it started to feel like an elaborate Titan Quest mod.

My plan when starting ARPGs like this is to not look up any guides and play 'blind' and then just play the most basic Warrior archetype possible. I played co-op. There is no difficulty selection other than ticking a 'Veteran' box, which we decided to do. There is no character creation which is different than most ARPGs. You join servers from a server browser in the main menu, which looks fully featured and gives lots of details of the kind of rooms you can join, you can even see a preview of the players characters before joining the servers. Maybe the game has a bustling playerbase with its own economy in the end game, but I've heard not really because since the files are hosted locally its easy to hack and cheat items in so that kind of ruins the long term online economy stuff. I joined my friend, and sadly the game utilizes these lazy cutscenes like other cheap budget games do. Its these slideshow picture cartoons that looks like a college art project. Not a good first impression, but not a huge deal. I'll admit I didn't follow the story very closely, for multiple reasons. One is that the cutscene artstyle is just not engaging and feels lazy. Two, is that when you talk to NPC's around the game world, the other player cannot talk to them at the same time, and infact the other player flat out just misses the dialogue. This alone made us not really care about the story, a shocking design choice.

So we get into the first zone and start running around the outskirts of town slaying monsters. And instantly its reminiscent of Titan Quest. The core mechanics and systems are just the same, right down to the quest system and that same sort of vague feeling of not really knowing what to do. Sadly, theres still no Tab/overlay map. You still have to press M to pull up this big bulky map screen which is a huge pain and every ARPG needs a good map overlay and its shocking to see that after 10+ years of constant updates Grim Dawn still doesn't have one. Its notable that this is one of the few ARPGS where you can actually rotate the camera, which is an interesting novelty but I felt like it wasnt really necessary. It was more like a clunky hassle to keep having to re-orientate yourself and try to line up the map with the compass everytime I accidentally rotated the camera. Didnt seem like there was any button to automatically do it for you so it was kinda just annoying.  Since we're just going around these grassy fields slaying all sorts of monsters, I got my first few levels. And this is where (Like Titan Quest) the game presents you with your class selection. You can choose one of a handful of classes at the start, Soldier, Demolitionalist, Occultist, Nightblade, Shaman, etc... I went with Soldier as its the most obvious kind of basic Warrior melee class. The skill tree was intuitive enough, its not overly complex and you can make sense of everything and get a good idea of what it does. It starts off by presenting you a few basic skill choices, passives, and auras. And then each skill you choose also is attached with a line to a further upgrade path that just passively buffs it. After glancing at a few of the skills I just randomly chose to go with Forcewave, as it said in the description that it was used with Two handed weapons, which is the archetype I was interested in going for.

As the game progresses the overworld map fills out and reveals its sort of two-pronged design. The first half of the game takes place towards the right side of the overworld map, the center of the map nothing really happens except the starter main town Devil's Crossing, and then the left side of the map is the second half of the game. The right side of the map are grassy fields, rocky dungeons and catacombs, and various fortresses and bandit encampments. We never really knew exactly what quest to go for, we kind of just explored every last piece of Foggy area on the map to uncover new areas, kill all the enemies, and pickup any quest we could incase of accidentally stumbling across them and completing them. The world maps are gigantic sprawling open maps and fields that can take hours clearing before you come across the next major plot point/objective for progression, A similar problem I had with Titan Quest. I feel like it would of gave more direction and again, made the pacing feel better if atleast on the map it showed a general circle or indication of the area where the objective is, but it doesnt show you anything but eventually a Star icon when you physically happen across the objective. Sometimes I would try to manually look at the quest log and try to figure out how to do the objective, but more often than not it seemed like pointless confusion and instead found it better and easier to just ignore the quest objectives entirely until I happened to accidentally stumble across them organically. Thats how little use the quest log/descriptions are.

The game also has a sort of faction system but honestly I never figured out what the point of it is or how to use it. Doing various tasks in the world rewards reputation with different factions, and apparently you can go to these different factions hideouts and talk to special merchants that let you buy special faction items with the reputation but I could never get it to work? Like I would go to areas of people I had high reputation with and find the reputation merchants but all the items for the entire game was crossed out and I couldnt ever buy any of them. So I never understood it. A wasted mechanic? Wasted opportunity? Not explained very well? Who knows. There are a few key quest moments where (one player) gets to decide which NPC they want to side with and this determines what factions you side with but it all fell pretty flat and since the multiplayer dialogue system is so bad making one player miss all the dialogue we just never really cared about most of it and let the chips fall where they may.

The overall presentation and graphics are pretty compelling, though. It has that sort of grimdark vibe to it that games like Diablo 1 and 2 had, but also it can be really colorful and vibrant at times, especially with the dynamic day & night cycle sometimes you can get these slightly purple/green night time effects that are really immersive. The world detail, textures, and graphical fidelity are all well done. Even visually when you equip the various items they all look good and give your character a sense of progression and identity like equipping new helmets and body armors it has a significant difference and are suitably appropriate for the archetype youre going for, my character eventually looked like a menacing Knight/barbarian type guy which is sometimes hard to achieve in some ARPG's believe it or not. I'll give the game lots of praise for the monster variety there are all kinds of beasts , demons, insects, humanoids,monsters you encounter along the way that have unique AI behaviors like some of them are sharpshooter humans that stay at a distance while others are beasts that rush in blindly at you or zombies etc. The game also retains that special unique miniboss system from Titan Quest where you'll come across special monsters indicated by an icon above their head, and killing them gives a bunch of satisfying reward icons notifying you that your Fame with a particular faction has increased and the XP bonus. The overall UI and inventory is decently done, though I dont like the 'candy' look with all the colors all over the place, games like Diablo 1 and 2 as always are the gold standard here with how to do compelling UI aesthetics that other games just cant seem to match. Inventory management can be a pain in the ass, though. You have all these 'components' which I never really found out what to do with other than adding these tiny passive buffs to each piece of gear, but these things stack up all over the place and visually share the same sort of slots as Jewelery that it becomes a pain in the ass to manage trying to find your Rings/amulets in between all this crap. Thankfully you eventually get multiple inventory bags which I used to separate out my Quest items/components/and regular gear but still its not done that great. Theres another really annoying design where you swap between gear pieces and it will seemingly randomly throw them all around your inventory, making finding the item you were just comparing annoying too..aesthetically overall its okay, but mechanically it has some rather painful quirks. And maybe the items themselves dont have enough unique arts because it gets confusing sorting through a full inventory so many items can look the same. As I said though, the map especially sucks, and the health and energy bars look kinda bad (rectangles instead of orbs) but the latter is nitpicking. You have a skillbar where you can equip a handful of skills but I actually only used a SINGLE skill the entire game...More on that later.  The audio in particular is a striking standout of the presentation. The soundtrack goes from spooky Dark Ambient to these electric guitar arpeggiated riffs and at times almost sombre Western guitar tracks , to piano tracks, all with its own melancholic or grim vibes to it. Though, I cant say any of the town hub music themes stand out like Tristram or anything.

As for the general gameplay, progression, items, stats - the RPG experience?
Well, its very weird. I've played a lot of ARPGs before this, leading up to this, and had a fair bit of challenge with many of them. But for some reason or another, my playthrough of Grim Dawn was insanely easy and brainless. Even on Veteran mode. So much so that the aformentioned Forcewave skill I spoke of, was so powerful I used it the whole game without fail. It just never stopped annihilating waves of enemies with a single click, I don't get it. At the first few hours into the game, I was thinking "okay, this is easy, its gonna ramp up though" and literally the entire game I kept wondering when it would start being challenging or ramping up difficulty. There was a moment here and there where it was a little challenging, but 95% of the time we were just crushing through the content. So much so that I hardly used Health potions. And you get infinite health potions, they are just on a slight cooldown. A strange but notable change from Titan Quest, atleast you had to stock up on them in that game. Shorlty into the game I was going over all the UI statistics and trying to figure out the best way to determine how much damage I'm doing. Well, early on I found it. There is a "Damage per second" stat on your character sheet. Additionally, whenever you hover over a new item, it will tell you if its Plus (+green) or Minus (-red) DPS. So all I did for the entire game was basically stare at this character sheet DPS number and blindly equip items until it went up and equip any weapon that also made it go up. Sometimes (rarely) I would glance at my resistances and equip items that made me slightly lose DPS but massively raise resistance, which were pretty easy to find. Shockingly, this worked WAY too well. This Forcewave skill is this sort of slam where you hit the ground with your 2h melee weapon, and it makes a wave ripple through the ground and kills all enemy packs in its path in a big AOE. It both has big AOE (Area of effect) and also does good Single target damage. By default, it only lets you do it once every second or two. On the skill tree, my first plan was to Max Forcewave (15 points) then I noticed it has an additional passive buff that lets you SPAM the ability as much as possible, and it barely costs mana! What the fuck. It is so broken and overpowered, it seemed. Once I got this ability the game was a cakewalk. From there, there was another final 15 point passive to further increase Forcewave DPS, so the first half of the game was just me cranking up this Forcewave passive skills. maybe I just lucked out and coincidentally picked the most OP skill in the game  who knows. im shocked/surprised using the most braindead archetype of "big warrior guy smash with club" and its insanely good? surprising cause melee usually sucks in arpgs.

Also what was up with the respec system? It only costs 25 iron to respec and i consistently had like HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDs of iron so basically the game has infinite Respec which further adds to how trivial and easy the whole experience was being able to literally just stare at my DPS number and put respec random skills until i found the ones that made it go up the most. I just dont get the game design philosophy here. Did they rework the entire game in the past few years to make it way more casual/accessible? Was it always like this?
I think the last few years they have been steadily updating and even overhauling the game, who knows how much different it is nowadays - but some new feature I do know is the rolling ability. I bound this to Right click and at the tap of a button you have this roll/dodge maneuver almost like Souls inspired stuff...it works okay, it does bring excitement, engagement and feedback to the game and it was fun to kite enemies around by dodging past them, so probably a good addition here. Mostly very useful for bosses and made those fights more interesting.

The game also has Character stats, but only three of them. Constitution (health/defense) Cunning (damage/ailments) and Spirit (magic). I put 90% of my points into Cunning simply to make that DPS number go up. Some pieces of gear needed certain Constitution requirements, so I'd raise that to be able to equip stronger gear also. Its unbelivable how my most braindead RPG planning here has created such an easy playthrough, Im not sure if I accidentally stumbled across the most broken build in the game, or if the game is only challenging when you beat it 3 or 4 times. It has a difficulty system like Diablo 2, where you are unable to play the higher difficulties until you beat the campaign multiple times, probably then giving access to a wider variety of item stats and equipment. But for the sake of this playthrough and review I'm just getting to end credits and giving my thoughts about the base game and its campaign.

So that was much of the general kind of gameplay experience. Nothing really offensive or annoying, but not that exciting or challenging either. Very lukewarm. While the itemization is interesting, and there are tons of different stats that can roll on items, I rarely found it nessesary to make any hard decisions myself. Simply staring at that DPS number sufficed. There are set items, where you get bonuses for wearing multiple pieces of a same set, but I never got a chance to find any good ones. There are 'double rare' items and im not sure exactly what they do but I never really find out amazing standout items that I cherished. Infact I found it kinda weird how the most mundane, basic rarity weapons seemed to give me the biggest DPS boosts, while super fancy looking unique/rare two hand item after item after item made said things like -6000dps. I guess Forcewave only scales with a few very specific stats and thats all you need to care about, so these fancy unique/rarer items having all sorts of stats is just categorically worse usually, kinda making the gearing not so interesting.  I also seemed to come across quite a few items that give +Skills to Forcewave and other stuff, so it is interesting and exciting that you can find items that boost skills. The itemization and stats at their core have a wide variety of interesting stats, its just that during my playthrough it didnt force me to care about them because just doing my caveman braindead DPS check did nothing but heavily reward me which I would consider a design flaw. The game has multiple main-quest bosses but none of them really stand out in my memory right now. I do remember a lot of kiting and dodging projectiles, so it does reward an active playstyle, but the boss designs/arenas themselves I guess arent too memorable because I cant really think of any other than the last boss , which at the time didnt even seem like the last boss or wasnt even obvious I was at the end of the game.

Eventually you get the option to unlock a second character class (Like TQ) and I eventually went with Shaman as it hinted it had bonuses for Melee and Two handed which is all I used him for. Just more passive DPS for two hand weapons. Simple. There is also another skill tree you unlock points with by (I think?) finding and clicking these Shrines around the map. Its this Devotion tree where its like a map of these projections in the sky of stars where you can choose constilations to put points into to get passive bonuses of various colors. You can hover over the general colors of the constilations to (I think) get an idea of the kind of archetype they apply to. For example, it seemed like the yellow ones had to do with Melee/physical/warrior type stuff, So I just put the few points I eventually collected into yellow constilations and got various melee/physical/defense buffs. Not sure about how indepth this system eventually gets but during the first campaign playthrough its very minor and insignificant. I only got a handful of points for it by the end of the game. Didnt matter too much I dont think. 

I was impressed for a bit because I thought the game didnt have level scaling. I was able to backtrack and be higher level than the previous enemies in the zone. Other (bad) ARPGs have level scaling where the enemies will always be the same level as you, I don't want to have to guesstimate whether farming a certain region will actually make me weaker. I don't want to feel like every time I kill a mob and it doesnt drop an upgrade my xp bar is one step closer to making me weaker and I need to get the gear to outrace the bar. But the thing is, Grim Dawn DOES have level scaling. Its just deceiving about it. Enemies will eventually stop scaling depending on certain zone. For the beginning of the game, they stop scaling quickly, something like after level 15 they stop scaling with you. But then other zones in the game, towards halfway mark, the enemies will constantly level up with you and be around your level until around level 50. So I kept grinding zones and XP thinking I was making progress out-levelling the enemies from level 25-50 but they just kept leveling along with me the entire time until eventually (at the end of the game) when it was over anyways did they finally stop scaling (at 50). In a way this system is even worse than other upfront level scaling ARPG's, this one just kind of deceives you and wastes your time. That really left a sour taste in my mouth once I figured that out. Also, you cant even see the zone levels and what levels the enemies scale at, its all hidden from you out of sight. I had to google it to find out this information cause I could sense something fishy was up.

As for the co-op mechanics, its fairly standard. You have infinite town portals, can make them at any time at the press of a button (L) for you and your co-op partner to teleport to eachother with. If you die, you can just teleport back to your friend. Thats about it, really, theres no reviving or anything. At least you can trade with eachother and inspect eachothers gear at any time. Also, before starting the game it gives the option if you want to see/share the same loot drops, or have your own individual loot drops. By default, its set to own individual loot drops, so thats what we went with.

After completing the first half of the game (right side of world map) you progress through the last half on the left side. Now, youre suddenly in a desert area with cowboy enemies and bandit gangs almost like something outta Fallout New Vegas. Okay, well thats atleast an interesting change of pace to the forest plains, dungeons, mines, of the first half. Much of the progression here takes place going through farmlands that are occasionally covered in enviormnetal damage over time effects that you now have to worry about and avoid ontop of the enemies. You get to a new main hub town , Homestead, which has a kind of annoying layout with multiple high stories. Then you start going through these like old Western cowboy towns killing all the local inhabitants but other than that its a lot of the sort of open-world open fields hordes of combat. Again, very similar gameplay and level design as Titan Quest. Nothing really notable springs to my memory though, just more of the same sort of generic fields and dungeons. Theres a part where you go into a Maggot lair which is a quest/area ripped straight out of Diablo 2 which I guess was kinda cool to see. As you get towards the end of the game more magical/mysterious areas you start going into and even Castle sieges and evil dungeons but really theres not many "Wow" moments thats going to be memorable. In the last few hours though, you come across a lot of these almost Lovecraftian Cthulhu inspired monsters and enviornments, which I thought was the highliht of the game. If only the rest of the game had more stuff like that, but its almost too little too late. Midway through the game I also sometimes came across these special zone portals where it teleports you to this creepy alternate realm full of crazy looking monsters that you cant teleport out of. You need a Skeleton key to progress through it to the end. And we failed doing it once and upon going back to the next one we needed another skeleton key even though we unlocked the door once and we couldnt do that content again, even though it was the most interesting content in the game. Sad. But mostly, the same complaints I had with Titan Quest I have here kinda. Theres too much "filler" zones with not enough refined standout moments and experiences. Its mostly just hordes of copy paste enemies in the same looking handful of biomes and areas. Even if the game had cutscenes to introduce different bosses or exciting moments, but theres just nothing to latch onto here in terms of long lasting effect. I cant even really remember the last few hours of the game, I just remember thinking I must be barely halfway through the game, going inside some castle dungeon , suddenly theres a big stantionary insect boss thing hanging off a ledge, I take 5 minutes killing it without much threat and then suddenly the game is over. I go back to town, the NPC tells me congratulations, I unlock the achievement for beating the game, it tells me next difficulty is unlocked and thats it. No ending cutscene. Nothing. Very anti-climactic awkward ending.  I know people say that the higher difficulties and endgame is where its at, and usually I would agree and wouldnt judge a game like this so soon, but strictly as a first time campaign playthrough my experience as of right now is pretty lukewarm and honestly disappointing. I thought the game would of offered much more exciting and interesting combat and challenging memorable encounters, interesting loot, and would be very less "casual". But out of all the ARPG's ive played lately, Im shocked to say Grim Dawn is probably the most casual/easiest one! Maybe some time down the road I'll revisit Grim Dawn to give it another shot as another class and try out the end game. At least it was a decent co-op experience, although we started to find it a bit of a slog at times throughout the 25 hours it took us to finish it. There is all sorts of DLC and expansions, too, that I eventually could be interested in playing through. But my first playthrough impression is just a general disappointment in how damn easy and mindless the whole thing was, even on supposedly 'veteran' mode.  Maybe this is why I've heard people call it 'Grim Yawn'?

6/10