A few weeks ago after I finished eviscerating Grim Dawn, and bemoaning my lost $12/12 hours, I continued on the quest that brought me to it in the first place. That quest was to find a good ARPG that wasn’t Diablo 4. I won’t be playing that game for reasons I’ve touched on before.
Note: That said, just because I’m not playing Diablo 4, it hasn’t stopped my friends. And I’ll be honest, after the honeymoon phrase wore off, none of them seemed to find it super compelling.
Then I found Last Epoch. And fortunately for me, Last Epoch is exactly what I wanted. A smooth, enjoyable ARPG with the ability to make a fun necromancer good build diversity, solid skills, and meaningful end game.
ARPG’s in Brief
For those who might not know, ARPG stands for “Action Role-Playing Game.” ARPG’s are defined by having virtually no roleplaying elements, and the action parts dominated by spamming your abilities every second you have the mana/rage/potato points to do so.
Here’s a less cynical definition: ARPG’s are traditionally top-down or isometric real time action games defined by extensive skill trees and character customization. Combat generally has two modes, fighting against trash mobs, which are pinatas for stacks of loot, and fighting against bosses, which are also pinatas, except this time they have the baseball bat.
Last Epoch doesn’t make any innovations that were obvious to me in the moment to moment gameplay. Skills are fun and enjoyable to use, attacks are generally well telegraphed, and have interesting variety. Bosses and enemies have a variety of interesting designs, instead of just being 20 different dudes in armor.
Skills and Skilltrees
But that’s not to say Last Epoch doesn’t innovate. The two main places where it makes changes are in its leveling and skill system.
Last Epoch has two parallel skill systems that compliment each other without overlapping. The first is a traditional passive skill tree that unlocks further abilities as pointed are allocated, with some abilities being gated behind specific earlier unlocks. Each class has a base skill tree available, along with several masteries. Investing points into the base and masteries unlock further active skills for use.
The second set of skill trees are the active skill skill trees. Each skill in Last Epoch has a full secondary skill tree that can fairly radically change how the skill works. Skills level independently of the player, and how they’re leveled can change the impact of the skill.
As an example of this, one of the bread and butter skills of my build was Summon Skeletons. Based on how it was leveled, I would have been able to turn it into a skill that summoned vast hordes, or a much smaller but stronger pool of skeletons. It could also built out in such a way that it summoned melee brawlers, flame arrow launching archers, or poison applying rogues.
Last Epoch does limit the player to 5 equipped skills. Initially I expected to hate this, but I found after a bit that instead it just forced me to focus on picking which skills I wanted to use.
Endgame
I think my favorite thing about Last Epoch, though, might be the endgame’s monolith system. Monoliths will feel familiar to anyone whose played Path of Exile, as its somewhat parallel to that game’s map system. They’re sets of random maps that are linked together on a world map. They generate semi-randomly, remixing tiles and mobs from the main game, with a temporary challenge to clear them.
Clearing them generates stability, and clearing them without dying also gives a chest of extra loot, and some specific rewards based on the nodes, allow for a certain level of target farming.
Stability in a given monolith unlocks sets of bespoke mini-missions, with specific boss fights items that aren’t available in the general pool, or main campaign. My personal favorite was a fight against a gigantic icy necromancer dragon.
There are also a bunch of other missions and modes that are unlocked by collecting and spending keys. I’ll be honest, I’ve tried some of these modes several times, and I’ve been flattened each time.
Crafting and Items
A brief note: For most of this post, I’ve been trying to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone who isn’t familiar with the genre. This section isn’t going to do that. If you’re not a nut-job for ARPG’s feel free to skip this bit, as I’m going to be using a bunch of jargon that won’t make sense if you’re not familiar with the genre.
There are several categories of items in Last Epoch. These include normal items that roll affixes within tiers as is commonly done in the genre. They also include unique items, items that can drop with variation in their rolls, but generally offer some sort of weird build around benefit that can change up a build. Finally, it has set items, similar to unique in having specific names and rolls, but offering a benefit for equipping a certain number of items in the set.
There are also legendary items, created in a system that involves fusing unique and exalted items, but I haven’t actually made any of these yet. Point is, there’s a lot of depth here.
Last Epoch doesn’t currently allow trading between players. Instead, it makes up for it with a fairly robust crafting system, and providing a pretty ample amount of resources to do so with.
Unlike other games that only allow you to reroll the affixes and tiers of an item, items in Last Epoch drop with a value called forging potential. This is loosely a resource that defines how many changes can be made to the item before it stays locked in forever.
The crafting system is simple: spend items called shards to either upgrade or add prefixes/suffixes to an existing item. Doing this spends forging potential. However, items can only have their tiers upgraded to a particular level, with items having a tier above that are only available in drops.
In case none of this made any sense, here’s the end result:
Last Epoch has a strong crafting system that allows upgrading existing and weaker gear to be tuned for the current content, and also easily allows shoring up missing stats such as resistances. At the same time, it still puts the highest tier of gear locked behind drops, thus making it so that there’s still incentive to farm for end game gear.
Maybe I should have just written that instead.
Closing Comments
Last Epoch is still in Early Access. While there’s some content missing, including several sets of skills and masteries for various characters, and the full complete story campaign, I never really felt their absence. The only real problem I have with the game in it’s current state is with the multiplayer. Multiplayer suffers from some small lag and loading issues, with multiplayer and online games having much longer load times than offline.
However, these look like issues that will eventually be addressed. And I still recommend the game in it’s current state.
Last Epoch also has a bunch of other small features I really appreciate but don’t quite have time to cover in this writeup, including a powerful but understandable item filter, auto-sort, the ability for crafting items to be sent to storage at any point in time instead of eating inventory space, and a reasonable skill respecing system.
Last Epoch is $35 on Steam.