Last Epoch is an amazing action RPG, combining mechanics and systems that satisfyingly come together to create an experience where you just want to keep playing, creating new characters, trying more builds and finding out how things work out. The story is nothing to write home about - especially after the twenieth time through - but I’m just playing it nonstop since it came out of early acccess, and boy is it great.
Character creation has you choose between five classes and each class has three subclasses to choose from at some point in the campaign. Each base and subclass have a few skills to choose from, and in Last Epoch, skills have their own skill trees, which can dramatically alter how they play. Because you can slot and improve five skills and each combination of class/subclass has about 16 (a bit more usually) to pick from, you might play a class a certain way, beat the game, then decide to try the very same class again, but with a completely different build. This can manifest in simple ways, like a Sorcerer wielding fire, ice or lightning, but in more complex ones as well, like a shapeshifting druid having three different forms to shift into, with each form having synergies with other skills that you can improve.
The game itself is fairly dense, mechanically, with some stats that improve a few sub-stats, resistances, defenses and other characteristics. There’s ward (a bit like Energy Shield from Path of Exile, but it drains instead of filling up, and you can have ward retention to keep more of it) that’s an interesting take on the additional defensive layer for mages, and endurance, which lowers the damage you take when you’re at low health (but I gotta admit I never noticed its effects). There are a ton of statuses to inflict on enemies, some of which just inflict damage, but others are about shredding resistance, lowering speed, and more, while accumulating buffs on your character that help in various ways (I wish all buffs had little timer icons, it feels inconsistant only for some of them to be visible when you have them). The game has a big lexicon of mechanics but it’s also the kind of systems that you can learn by playing.
Each level, you get skill points to place into your base or subclass’s passive tree, unlocking new skills and buffs. The tree has prerequisites so you need to think about where you’re going with your points, but it’s not that heavy and respecs are fairly inexpensive. I find it a bit weird that base clases have more than 20 points worth of passives, because at the 20 point mark you start putting them into your subclass, are there really situations where someone would wait until they put 25 points in there? And skills level as they are used, giving you points to place in their own skill tree. Prerequisites for skills are much more restrictive, and you only have 20 points total, so you can’t try everything. Respeccing a skill is quite costly in time, because it basically levels it down, so you still need to commit.
Itemization is, in my opinion, one of the weakest part of Last Epoch, there’s just too much of it. This game suffers from the avalanche of effects on every piece of gear where you would have to decide if four effects are better or worse than four different effects. The game attempts to fix this with a very solid filter system that was a bit complicated to use at first but I think I got the hang of after a while. You can setup which items you want to see drop with a good level of granularity, deciding what effects you want, what class of items you want, and more. It’s not perfect, and you need to know in advance what kind of character you are playing in order to properly set up a good filter, but it works. Otherwise, the game has a good variety of unique items with powerful effects and set items as well. You also get “idols”, that are like Charms from Diablo 2 that you can keep in a special inventory. They’re neat, but I bet that having a full inventory of those and getting new ones might lead to a boring time of trying to compare them all, sometimes. There’s also a good crafting system where you can build items more or less the way you want by adding and removing effects and strengthening them, which helps a lot too.
The story, setting and characters are all okay, there’s a vague time travel component to it, but its under-utilized, you’ll go to different time periods, but it’s all linear and you’ll never have the option to go to a time period or another to impact something outside of the flow of the story. I have nothing bad to say about the plot of the game by itself, because it works well to support the action RPG around it, but the fact that you have to do all the campaign every single time with all your characters is also fairly annoying. The story is crafted from A to Z and the maps are always the same, so you know where to go and what to do next, but it becomes repetitive. I know there is a way to “skip” some parts of the story by going through a few optional dungeons, but I never managed to do that. I think this is all because the end-game requires a certain level, and fast-forwarding your character from 1 to 55 would lessen the experience.
The difficulty of the game is pretty even thorough the campaign, but squishier characters not built with survivability in mind will die here and there. Some bosses (Lagon, and the last boss of the campaign) will be roadblocks if you don’t have enough in lieu of defense, usually one-shotting certain offensive-minded builds and throwing you back to the beginning of the fight. I couldn’t beat the game with certain classes because of these two boss in particular, but I feel that’s on me rather than being a flaw of the game. Speaking of the end-game, you complete side-scenarios in procedurally generated maps where you decide the path you want to take, accumulating Stability until the scenario is complete. I have to admit that I didn’t play much of the endgame because once I beat the final boss, I really just wanted to start a new character.
Last Epoch is pretty amazing. I enjoy playing it much more than Diablo 4 and I’m starting to wonder how I’ll be able to pull myself away from it. There are still a few classes I haven’t beaten the game with, the whole of the endgame, and they’re probably going to release new seasons or something at some point. If you enjoy that kind of game, I recommend it a hundred percent. It’s real good!
