It only took an hour of playing Path of Exile 2’s early access version to know I’d soon be firing up an Excel spreadsheet and saying goodbye to all my loved ones for the foreseeable future. Just when I thought I was out, the heartless maniacs (in a good way) at Grinding Gears Games have pulled me back in with a sequel to one of my favorite action RPGs of all time – a game which has already consumed much of my life since it came out a decade ago. The gameplay, endgame mechanics, and insanely intricate buildcrafting all take massive steps forward, and even though it’s subject to many of the usual “early access jank” caveats and suffers from some seriously stingy loot drops right now, there’s already a lot to love about this fantastic, time-destroying ARPG.
Per all the genre’s usual tendencies, you can expect to spend your time blasting your way through armies of enemies in search of loot, taking down big, gross-looking bosses, and teleporting back to town to sell off your spoils roughly every two minutes due to your insanely small inventory space. In its presently unfinished state, it takes about 60 hours of battling your way through the first three acts of the campaign (of a planned six) twice in a row (on a higher difficulty the second time) before you hit the impressively extensive endgame, where even more angry mobs and shiny gear waits for you. And although it has plenty of technical jank and placeholders labeled “coming soon” where features should be, the vast majority of my multi-day marathon to get there was overwhelmingly enjoyable.
Needless to say, Path of Exile 2 doesn’t exactly rock the storytelling boat – it sticks with the usual tale of horrifying abominations which threaten to destroy the world and immortal beings treating mortals as pawns – but that doesn’t mean it’s boring or without the occasional twist and turn. Getting to know the cast of characters and unraveling the otherworldly culture and history featured in each act is a particular highlight. I grew quite fond of Alva, a treasure hunter who loves adventure almost as much as she loves making quick exits whenever danger shows up, and getting to know the Maraketh, a brutal group of desert survivalist nomads, was very compelling. We don’t know what the second half of that story has in store, so the jury’s still out on whether or not it’ll stick the landing, but so far it’s off to a decent, if not entirely original start.
While Path of Exile 2 plays it safe with the story, it swings for the fences when it comes to ambitious gameplay, and the result is one of the most irresistibly playable action-RPGs to-date. After picking one of the six classes currently available (Grinding Gear says there will be 12 eventually) you’ll start down the long, arduous path of making heads or tails of their incomprehensibly complex skill trees. They almost seem like they were designed to be sarcastically dense as you slowly piece together a build you like – it only takes one look at the main passive perk tree, which has over 1,500 perks to choose from, to realize you’re gonna be fogging up those nerd glasses quite a bit. Then you’ll bring those abilities and equipment to bear on all manner of zombies and weird lizard monsters in a relentless hunt for loot and XP that, if you’re as eager to smash the next fleshy pinata open to see what’s inside as I am, is prone to keep you up long into the night. Throw in the fact that maps are procedurally generated and offer a pretty high degree of replayability while also managing to not feel like they weren’t handcrafted, and you’re liable to lose yourself for the better part of a week like I did.
There’s a plethora of gameplay improvements over Path of Exile 2’s predecessor that make slashing through hordes of monsters endlessly entertaining, including dodge-rolling that adds a much-needed skill component to keeping yourself alive, WASD support that makes movement so much better, and other quality-of-life improvements that bring Path of Exile 2 much more in line with its modern peers. But in a lot of ways it surpasses them, too, with action-packed combat that feels a lot less passive than, say, Diablo 4, where you might find yourself hypnotically using the same combination of abilities over and over again as you plow through enemies. You can certainly get to an insane level of power eventually, but the vast majority of the time enemies will at least put up a fight, especially during boss battles where you’ll need to learn your foe’s attack patterns to survive. This ends up making combat feel a lot more like a proper action game than most action-RPGs.
It helps that each of the classes offers a unique way to play that dramatically mixes things up to a much greater degree than other ARPGs. For example, choosing the Dexterity-focused Ranger will have you keeping your distance, dancing around the map, and most importantly, focusing on your Evasion stat which gives you a chance to completely ignore attacks that land on you – but if you ever do manage to get hit by something big, like a boss, you’re toast. Alternatively, if you choose a Warrior, you’ll be running into close-quarters battle wearing the thickest armor you can find and focus on cleaving the enemy in two before they can whittle down your health. Meanwhile, the Mercenary trades a sword for a crossbow that effectively turns the entire adventure into a top-down shooter that feels very unlike any other character. For my part, I spent the majority of my time as a Witch focusing on a minions build that let my thrall do the fighting for me, so I often spent my time just supporting my undead homies and shouting words of encouragement. That’s a level of gameplay diversity I haven’t seen Path of Exile 2’s contemporaries achieve.
Between the eyebrow-raisingly complex passive perk trees, your skill and support gem loadouts, the Atlas perk tree and Ascendancy tree (which are two endgame trees with even more effects to consider), and your overall equipment loadout, there are about a dozen extremely convoluted systems to learn if you hope to master your character, and in this case that’s great news. When you decide to play them more than casually, ARPGs are all about burying your face into horrifyingly complicated menus searching for the most powerful possible combination of stats, and Path of Exile 2 delivers on this front even more than its predecessors. It might take a while (okay, actually quite a long while) to figure out how each piece of the puzzle works, especially if you’re diving in early before the hardcore crowd gets hold of it and creates step-by-step recipes you can follow, but doing so makes for an awesome time if, like me, you’re into that terribly nerdy business. The only thing that’s a bit irritating about playing the early access version now is that not every skill tree has been finished, so you might want to chase a specific build or power, only to find out that power is still just a twinkle in the designers’ eyes. That could, for example, mean you aren’t able to purchase support skills to complement your build and take it in a different direction.
Where Path of Exile 2 definitely falls short, though, is with its loot. That’s not because the items you get are bad (finding a sceptre that let my Witch summon even more undead minions was quite nice, for example), but because it’s incredibly stingy with them. The first issue is that there seems to be no protection at all in ensuring the loot that drops is geared towards your chosen class – and even if you find stuff that is, it’s often not good or won’t work with your build since you’ll frequently require highly specific items to improve upon it. I didn’t even see a single Unique (a powerful, curated tier of items) drop until I had played for over 60 hours, and when I finally did it was a bow that my magic-focused character had no way of using. You can always trade with other players for gear you need, but it still feels pretty awful to grind your face off and not see anything worthwhile come of it, especially if you’d rather not interact with other people.
Similarly, while there are a few options for taking middling items and leveling them up with new perks and higher rarities to improve your chances, these don’t come close to fixing how anticlimactic loot drops often feel, and you’ll likely find yourself using your best items long after you’ve leveled beyond them for sheer lack of alternatives. None of this should come as a surprise from fans of the first Path of Exile, as loot has always been hard to come by there as well, but it’s really something I thought Grinding Gear might address in this followup. Obviously it’s been a successful approach with the audience Path of Exile has built, but in my book that’s a pretty big miss for an ARPG, where cool loot can be a major selling point. I hope the loot dial gets turned at least a little toward the more rewarding side of things during the early access period.
If you plan to jump in at launch, hopefully you really enjoy your first playthrough of Path of Exile 2’s first three campaign acts, because right now you’ll have to give them a second go if you want to reach the endgame content. That’s because, instead of finishing all six acts for the early access build, Grinding Gear focused on the first three and wisely directed the rest of its attention to fleshing out the endgame so that it can be finely honed for the full launch. That was a smart choice generally speaking, but instead of letting you beat the first half of the story and immediately advance to the post-campaign grind, it instead makes you play through the whole thing twice – with no changes in the second run aside from scaled-up enemy levels – before finally granting you access to the endgame. Even though I enjoyed the story, playing it all again back to back just to reach an arbitrary character level left a bad taste in my mouth and makes things unnecessarily repetitive at the moment. It’s especially weird that the second run, called “Cruel Mode,” isn’t actually harder – in fact, it was a whole lot easier since I knew what was coming and had a far stronger build. That makes the whole second playthrough pretty monotonous. Couldn’t they have just boosted our characters and equipment to the proper level instead?
Thankfully, once you do manage to progress into the endgame, you’re in for a good time: Path of Exile 2 is surprisingly fleshed out on this front despite being quite unfinished. The main course is the Atlas, a massive, procedurally generated map that lets you explore nodes to reach objectives, including mysterious merchants, hidden boss fights, and more surprises lying in wait – it’s kind of like Diablo meets Super Mario World’s overworld map in the best way. While very similar to the original’s endgame, this version expands and improves on virtually every aspect and has been a complete blast to explore. I’ve likely only just scratched the surface after more than a dozen hours with it, but I could already see myself dumping another hundred hours into this thing. Beyond that, there are trials that pit you against special objectives and challenging modifiers to unlock powerful rewards and progress down your Ascendancy perk tree, as well as an endgame boss that serves as the final gauntlet for Path of Exile 2’s most dedicated adventurers. It’s an impressive amount of content and quite well thought out, especially for an early access game, but that’s hardly surprising given the first Path of Exile’s decade-plus of lessons learned while building upon its own endgame content.
That said, a robust endgame hasn’t saved Path of Exile 2 from much of the usual jankiness that comes with early access games. I saw everything from the minor stuff, like framerate hiccups, to the extremely infuriating stuff, like that time a patch removed all of the skill gems, support gems, and the best weapon from my inventory, all but destroying my build and forcing me to grind much of it back. Per usual, I recommend waiting to hop in if you’re the type of person to throw their controller out the window when things don’t work as intended, as playing in early access isn’t for the faint of heart and your prized loot could vanish in an instant. It’s a testament to how good everything else is that these issues didn’t completely turn me off from continuing to play. It’s also worth mentioning that Path of Exile 2 already looks and sounds much better than its predecessor, even if it still doesn’t look nearly as good as a AAA cohort like Diablo 4 – so it’s a notable visual upgrade, but nothing that blew my socks off.
