Path of Exile 2 Review (TheCodeTherapy)
This should be taken with a grain of salt as I played Path of Exile 1 for 6500 hours, and my first impressions are biased by the differences in comparison with a game I love so much as PoE 1. I'll obviously disregard all the disconnections and the "login screen simulator" because, well, we already kinda accept that.
In Path of Exile 2, the entire campaign feels like playing The Mud Flats on Path of Exile 1. The gameplay feels very sluggish, and killing every mob pack is a task by itself. It's not hard at all... it's just tiresome. The boss fights felt the same to me.
I tested 3 different classes, and movement always felt incredibly slow, even with boots with movement speed or playing as Monk with skills that favour movement. The game feels clunky... nothing is snappy. It feels like everything has too much weight and inertia, and you're always struggling to move or do anything (cast a spell, dodge, walk, hit something, open a portal). It feels like slow motion.
Having collisions between players in the same party was a terrible idea, and it feels awful, especially in narrow corridors and passages, even with the rolling dodge. You and your teammates block each other all the time and even walking too close to another player in your party in open areas will be annoying.
Your power scaling as you progress through the game feels as slow as the player's movement. In PoE1 you feel more and more powerful as you progress through the campaign, and you keep feeling challenged by facing larger packs of more powerful monsters. In PoE2, you feel you keep fighting the same quantity, level, and types of monsters you started fighting against, but you feel weaker against them.
In regards to graphics, I understand they wanted to improve the visuals for items and gems, given how beautiful the new graphics of the game are right now, but while chasing for visual consistency, they made it so everything looks the same, and you can't distinguish between things or easily spot what you're looking at. In PoE1, if you fill a tab with different types of boots, you can clearly distinguish them. The same goes for Gems. In PoE2, everything looks the same. All the gear looks like indistinguishable beige scraps, and looking at gems on a stash tab tells you nothing about them.
I could keep writing here about many other aspects I disliked, but I don't want to trash the game, that's not my intention here. Also, after only about 13 hours of playing the game, this should obviously be considered with a grain of salt as it's more of a "first impressions" community feedback rather than a full review.
Like me, everyone who has played PoE1 since its beta knows how long it took to become the game it is today (my favourite game). Maybe GGG still has a lot to improve on it, and maybe it will become a better game than it is on early access, but for now, sadly, it feels like PoE2 is for PoE1 exactly what Diablo 3 was for Diablo 2: not the same game with improvements, but a worst and different type of game.
Many of its positive reviews on Steam just say a brief "D4 bad", and I don't disagree with the sentiment about Diablo 4. What I'll say is that this game is too much like D4 and too far from PoE1 for me to like it as it is right now.
I love Path of Exile, and I sincerely hope this game gets better in time.