Path of Exile

I was going to perform a review on some games I recently play tested (either in beta or live) and forgot to do so.  So I'm doing it now.

I play tested Path of Exile in March over an open beta weekend.  I am no longer in that beta.  I wish I was.

Path of Exile is a very Diablo-esque game.  In fact, it echos Diablo I quite loudly in one key feature: your character does not have it's own spells/skills.  You only obtain skills/spells by obtaining gems which you socket in to gear.

There are red, green, and blue gems.  The gems, once socketed, being gaining experience and can level up, which levels up the skill they grant.  This then makes the skill more powerful.

Pretty simple right?  Well, it gets complicated.  You can build "builds" or "specs" based on a set of skills; so then you have to find certain gems to obtain those skills.  You're at the mercy of drop chance and quest random reward results to obtain the gems you require to have the skills you want.

Lame.

You also need the gear that will allow you to socket the gems you require; each color has specific color sockets in gear.  They're randomly generated, so one piece of gear might have one blue socket, another piece might have 3 red sockets, and yet another piece might have a green and blue socket.  Some have one of each.

Yucky.

It seems like people are most often determining what bonuses they want out of the sphere grid before deciding on skills they may want from gems.  The sphere grid is exactly what it sounds like: a grid of spheres that are connected together in a very whimsical and complicated pattern.  To obtain a certain sphere, you may have to first obtain spheres around it to "unlock" it.  Each of the classes (Ranger, Templar, Duelist, Marauder, and Witch) starts at a different spot on the grid, causing them to never be able to access far reaching areas of the grid intentionally.

However, the grid has 177 nodes.  That's a lot of effing nodes.  Here I'll show you:

Wtf?  I didn't know I was playing Final Fantasy X.  How did this get on my computer?

So yeah.  You can see how complicated this can get.  You can see the six "starting" areas.  Each class starts in said area.  And in this image you can see this person did make it from one end to the polar opposite of the sphere for this build.  But that's as far as he's going.  He's used almost all of his skill points here.

Imagine having to read all of those nodes and go, alright I want to use just "these" for my Templar or Ranger or [insert class here].

That's a lot of fucking free time I don't have.  Sorry, Path of Exile.  I'm not buying you.

I'm a casual gamer.  I have been for the last four years.  I haven't spent more than ten hours a week gaming since I left Whitewater.  I just can't do it anymore.  I fall asleep, I get burnt out on a game, and then I don't want to play it anymore.

Now, I'm busy doing normal people shit; like going to work, going to the grocery store, cooking dinner, and exercising.

While Path of Exile might be a well designed game, it's not for casual players who have little to no free time to commit to a video game.  You'll quickly lag behind and find it incredibly boring to play by yourself.  Especially if, like me, you just go to Google, search for an "end-game" build for the class you're playing, and just use that.

I give the game 4/5, simply because it's a game that has limited its audience (and thus, its market), so it probably won't be around long.