Sim’s Awesome Grim Dawn Posts

My remarks are very preliminary. I found a more detailed youtube overview below (disclosure: I haven’t watched most of this, as the guy’s sugar-high enthusiasm sort of puts me off; also it’s a bit NSFW):

I played about an hour and half of the game last night. My character is an Arcanist or some similar name — not sure about the spelling. All I know is that she uses elemental magic. Other classes are fairly standard.

I wasn’t able to tell much in my short play time. The atmosphere reminds me of what would happen if Path of Exile created a love child with Titan Quest. The starting area and events are very reminiscent of how the latter game begins, and the design/look are very similar to the former. I’m not able to tell you much about the skill system because I don’t really understand it yet. Maybe the youtube guy will elaborate on this.

The good news for Master Race types is that this is wholly a PC game. It was obviously made not only first and foremost for the computer; it appears to have been made exclusively for that platform. I don’t see how they would conveniently port it to a console. Everything is clearly mouse- and keyboard-driven. The inventory, for example, would have a hard time translating to Xbawx.

The game runs well so far on my computer (i7 4790, GeForce 970, 16gb RAM, 500gb SSD, etc.). I experienced no crashes, slowdowns, or other anomalies. However, the general look and feel is a little, erm, rough. It doesn’t have the slick professional feel of something like Diablo 3 — I wouldn’t say it’s clunky or amateurish, but it’s more PoE-ish than it is D3.

Everything is . . . grim. Yes. Grim and dark. But it’s still pretty nice-looking. I would say it’s somewhere between PoE and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing in this department.

I can’t say much about gameplay. The starting area is full of pushover creatures who seem to be there just to let you get used to the combat, which is standard ARPG pew pew and whack whack.

I can say nothing about mp or co-op, as I haven’t tried this part. The developers claim that you can have four players in co-op, so that’s nice, I suppose — if it works and isn’t too messy.

The game regularly sells for $25, but I got a 10% discount as an early-adopter encouraging gesture. I will have to play more to determine whether this is a good buy, but right now I’d say that if you want more Titan Quest with an overlay of Path of Exile, and if you want this in a single-player game, you could do worse than Grim Dawn. I hope to add more as I progress.