Overall you need to give in order to receive, and skillful players should find that they still allow for a brutal massacre, each kill fueling the next.
In this system, the potions are only as good as you are, although the idea of suddenly finding yourself with empty potions and low health can be mitigated by opening a portal, stepping back into town, being instantly refilled, and popping back. Being able to fill your potions through the simple process of laying waste your enemies is a massive improvement over Diablo II’s system of chugging potions and Diablo III’s system of mostly relying on health orbs. Path of Exile offers up five slots to fill with potions of health, mana, speed, etc. Which brings me to another positive about Path of Exile: No health orbs. So far, my only use for the vendor has been to purchase higher tier potion flasks. Much like its predecessors, the vendors in Path of Exile don’t have much worth buying that can’t be easily replaced with something found in the field, so the game essentially does away with the accumulation of useless wealth entirely. In place of the usual gold system, Path of Exile trades in items like identification scrolls and augmentation gems. There is your standard and hardcore modes, as well as temporary races and leagues set up with additional challenges.
The game is full of your standard fare, you go around slaughtering thousands upon thousands of mindless shambling minions for experience and loot to upgrade your character and level up. Path of Exile seems to have taken the best of all worlds when it comes to gameplay mechanics, with enough left standing that players from the Diablo and Torchlight games should be right at home. My favorite class personality, the Templar, truly believes that his betrayal by the other members of his order and subsequent exile is part of God’s greater plan to use him as a tool to cleanse the world of evil. So strike that down as positive number one: I never thought I would see an ARPG with a story that I would find moderately interesting. The ranger was exiled for living off of the land, and sees Wraeclast as just another land to live off of. The duelist murdered a lord who threatened his honor, and intends on staying true to his beliefs. The Witch, for instance, was exiled because she murdered several children in retaliation for their parents burning down her house out of fear that she might, oh say, murder their children. You are an exile who has been sent to this land for varying reasons, and wash up on shore after your captors lovingly throw you overboard with the simple message of “sink or swim.” Each class has its own personality and a story that is both simple and rather endearing.
Let’s start with story: Path of Exile takes place on the grim, dark, and gritty continent of Wraeclast, the land of the doomed filled with nothing but evil.
To sum up Path of Exile in this fashion wouldn’t do the game justice, so let’s dive in and see what it has to offer. You are either a fan of the genre or you aren’t, and tastes may vary depending on feature changes or art style. There isn’t much story, you travel through randomly generated dungeons, kill a nation’s worth of minions and bathe in the oceans of loot that they drop, slowly leveling your character and improving your equipment and abilities, chugging potions while taking down giant bosses, and playing cooperatively with your friends. Up until now, I could probably review most ARPGs with a single paragraph since fans of the genre already know whether or not they’re going to play it. Path of Exile is quite possibly the most difficult game by far that I have reviewed here at MMO Fallout.