Last Epoch – ARPG Game Review

Overview

Last Epoch is a newly released action role-playing game (ARPG) on Steam this February 2024, that has been in early access for 5+ years. The 1.0 release brought a lot of visual and technical improvements to the game and has been making waves in the ARPG genre for its game experience and the sincerity of how its game developers have communicated with players.

The game goes up against Diablo 4 and Path of Exile amongst other titles to compete for ARPG supremacy. ARPGs of this nature are generally games that you spend a lot of time on to farm rare items and improve your character, so it’s uncommon for players to split their time equally between these types of games. They’d rather focus on one game at a time, and Last Epoch is generating a lot of focus right now. Usually players will seasonally play a character in an ARPG, and once they get bored, they try a different build or class.

Last Epoch boasts 5 main classes, that split into 15 total subclasses, with potentially thousands of optional builds to choose from, and countless ways to personalize the builds to your liking.

Sentinel – A warrior, sword and shield type class that excels in tankiness and melee combat. Subclasses include: Paladin, Forge Guard and Void Knight.

Rogue – A dagger and bow specialist which specialises in speed and shadow assassination type skills. Subclasses include: Bladedancer, Falconer and Marksman.

Primalist – A barbarian/druid type warrior who uses beast companions, totems and elemental melee attacks. Subclasses include: Beastmaster, Shaman and Druid.

Mage – A classic magic wielding class which can specialise into different magic elements. Subclasses include: Runemaster, Sorcerer and Runeblade.

Acolyte – A dark mage who uses forbidden magic and can summon undead minions. Subclasses include: Lich, Warlock and Necromancer.

The game lets you build your character into a choice of passive skills and 5 active skills, and equipment is similar to other ARPG titles like Diablo in terms of slots and affixes. With the addition of being able to unlock blessings in end game.

The game features a fairly unique crafting system, which is more of a refining system in reality. You find items that have potential and alter the affixes using seals and glyphs to your liking. There is an element of luck involved and therefore you could create an almost perfect item or brick it into being useless.

Version 1.0 also brings in factions, with a choice of either joining a player trading system or being able to boost the luck and selection of your drops. This has been widely praised for delivering a system that suits both types of players, ones who prefer to play a market, and pick and choose their gear and ones who just want to focus on their own play and drops.

Visuals

The graphical style of Last Epoch is excellent in 1.0, many of the animations and art have been upgraded and the game now rivals the other isometric ARPGs in its genre. There are a massive variety of effects and animations, many of which are extremely satisfying to use. The backgrounds are especially beautifully crafted, as something that is often taken for granted in games of this nature, since you move through the areas of the game so quickly. There is a good variety of different environment, from cold and icy mountains to dark and dreary dungeons and sewers. The visual standard of this game is very high and applaudable considering its variety.

Audio

The game features good quality audio, music and sfx. Whilst the music and atmospheric sound is good, it does lack a certain identity. It basically melds into the game, with no tracks really standing out too well. The standout audio is mostly the sfx for attacks in the game, nearly all of which are satisfying to use, the thunks of weapons and crash of abilities all sound decent and enhance the game greatly. It’s just a shame the game doesn’t have an iconic music accompaniment to really match up with the visuals. Some of the enemy sfx do get a little grating after some time, but the culture of ARPGs players is to generally play your own music playlist whilst they play anyway, so it’s not a massive loss to the game.

Gameplay

The gameplay is very smooth, it delivers the ARPG experience very well overall. The developers know what players want (likely because they are ARPG fans themselves), and that’s to crush hordes of enemies with your skills in a procedurally generated dungeons in order to gather rare drops and improve your character. They also realise that the building of your character, the choice and the flexibility of character builds is core to player satisfaction in games like this.

Novelty

Unfortunately this isn’t a particular novel game, Last Epoch doesn’t try to re-invent the wheel here. This is a game that melds the best from other ARPGs in an attempt to perfect the experience and enjoyment of this type of game. Whilst there are some novel systems introduced in the game, nothing really changes the core gameplay of ARPGs. They introduce some great QoL changes, but then since the game is new, it lacks a lot of QoL options that other games like Diablo contain already.

On that note, the game is heavily influenced by Diablo. To the point it almost seems like a Diablo clone, the classes, environments, everything feels like a Diablo game. However it lacks the iconic nature of that Diablo cultivated, not that Diablo is some story masterpiece, but the world crafting of Diablo definitely hits better than Last Epoch, which struggles to find an identity outside a medieval/magic romp through a wall of enemies.

The game introduces the concept of time travel, that you travel between eras, but other than in one dungeon mechanic where you can use this ability to avoid a boss attack mechanic, this has no impact than to simply change the environment for a different level.

Content

Last Epoch contains a campaign story of 9 chapters which takes roughly 15 hours to complete at leisure, and an end game system that contains 10 repeatable procedurally generated areas, each with a unique boss encounter, 3 dungeons each with a special boss encounter which require an extra mechanic use and 2 arena events where you fight waves of enemies and then a player type boss.

After finishing the campaign story, you generally complete the 10 areas, known as monoliths (you can skip a few of them), to then unlock empowered monoliths. Empowered monoliths can have their difficulty increased through corruption, with a better chance of rewards as the difficulty scales. The dungeons and arena (which all need a specific dropped key to enter) are split into 4 tiers, and dungeons can be used to skip through the campaign when levelling new characters. Currently the most difficult content is high corruption monoliths and Tier 4 dungeons. The max level cap currently is 100. A corruption of 500 is considered a competitive place to play at, and a corruption of 1000 is seen as extremely good. The minimum level of corruption is 100, and there is no maximum.

With all that, the end game of Last Epoch is somewhat sparse. Whilst dungeons have some specific unique drops, their rewards aren’t as good as empowered monoliths, which is where you’ll spend 90% of your time in end game.

Monoliths use a node exploration system where you enter a map and have a random objective to complete, when you complete the objective you can portal out and collect your rewards. Each node rewards stability towards unlocking the timeless boss encounter, you can gain extra stability by clearing out the map of the majority of enemies. Each node has a specific reward type and a specific enemy buff that you can see before you enter it. Completing a boss encounter allows you to gain a blessing (a bonus affix with a range) which is an equipped buff, and also a resource (Gaze of Orobyss) to increase the amount of corruption you receive when you beat a shade of Orobyss. Shades of Orobyss reside on specific nodes as mini-bosses and allow you to increase the corruption of the timeline.

Challenge

The game is quite straightforward in its challenge. Everything is pretty much a gear check in this game. It’s mostly a case that you either have the gear to survive or you just get one shot because you lack defensive stats.

You can get through the campaign story without any real effort, there are only two boss encounters that require you to avoid mechanics or to have built a relatively decent build.

The end-game situation of empowered monoliths is a gradual climb of finding better gear and increasing the corruption level. The tier 4 dungeon bosses are generally a gear check also, and require good defences to be built on your character.

In this way, you can’t really get through the difficult encounters by just being skilled at playing, you simply just get better gear or change your build to be more efficient. So ultimately the challenge in the game is choosing a good build and getting lucky with finding or crafting items or buying those items on the player marketplace with gold.

Polish

There is a good amount of attention to detail in this game. It only really lacks in two areas, worldbuilding and end-game variety. I don’t think the worldbuilding part of the game will be solved easily because it’s not something you can really tinker with quickly, and the end-game variety will hopefully be fixed with future updates.

There are some class balance issues that need addressing already. Ward builds are incredibly overpowered right now, some classes seem ridiculously strong and others quite weak, so I hope those issues are looked at fairly soon so that it’s a bit more fair.

Everything is fairly easy to use in this game. Whilst things like crafting look a bit daunting at first, the system is surprisingly straightforward and fair once you get used to it. The controls and UI are all implemented well, and whilst there are some QoL improvements that the game needs, the developers have proven to be very attentive to community feedback and I have no worries that straightforward QoL improvements will arrive quickly.

You can make a character and get into the action quickly, and the systems that the game uses are simple to understand. The inventory system and the stash system are good; there’s a very good loot filter that rivals PoE, and puts Diablo 4 to shame.

That said, the game is at a really good standard after 5 years of early access contributing to its development progress. Some people have criticised that fact, but people need to remember that this game isn’t from a huge game development studio. Eleventh Hour Games is an all remote indie small studio which started its development using Kickstarter working on their first game release. This type of project is one that is incredibly hard to compete with the triple A studios throwing millions of dollars and hundreds of career game developers at, yet they have potentially done a better job already. In my view, they’ve done an incredibly job and the game is an excellent contribution to the market.

Maybe the biggest complaints right now are that there are some problems when grouping with others, rerolling new characters wastes some time when you have to unlock monoliths and gather blessings again, and various bugs/glitches have needed fixing for a long time still from early access.

Value for money

This game has incredible value for money, currently priced at $34.99. If you are a serious ARPG fan, you can very likely sink 1000+ hours of enjoyment into the game just in its current form, let alone when more content is released. If this game isn’t for you long term, I still think there’s easily 100+ hours of quality enjoyment here, and it’s definitely a game worth buying..

Comparing to its main rival Diablo 4, which currently costs $69.99, the game is much better value for money. The game also compares well with Path of Exile, but since that’s a free base game, it’s hard to really beat it on value. All these games have forms of micro transactions, and Last Epoch’s are better priced than their rivals in my opinion. These are all cosmetic items, and most cost between 50 and 100 game currency; 100 epoch points costs $10. There are some higher priced cosmetic packages too.

Main rivals Path of Exile and Diablo 4 are somewhat ridiculous with their cash shop prices and definitely cater to players who are whales, whilst this has been extremely profitable for the developers of these games, it has angered many of their casual gamers and dropped these games long term appeal.

Game Stability

Whilst the game had a somewhat rocky launch the first week (is there an online game that doesn’t have a rocky release?), the stability issues have already been greatly improved, and the development team seems very focused on clearing up glaring game stability issues and bugs.

There were a lot of angry gamers the first week due to most people being unable to join online play and getting stuck when trying to load between areas. The game had such an influx of popularity that the developers had not really implemented a good server solution from day 1. This didn’t really work as a great excuse to players because the developers had already acknowledged 1 million sales as a massive milestone to them, yet hadn’t prepared for a million players joining at once around the world.

All through this time though, the developers have communicated extremely well and have already smoothed over the majority of the server issues that plagued the game in the first few days. This is actually very impressive and gives a really good indication for the game’s long term success.

Captivation

Once you get bored of running monoliths over and over again, players generally start to play a new character. It takes about 100 hours to hit a wall on your characters’ improvement. With 15 classes to play, the game has some longevity potential, but the core gameplay is not particularly varied even when accounting for these 15 classes.

Your character is either melee, ranged, minion focused, or revolves around using a specific item or combination of items as a gimmick. You build a character around their choice in survivability, so either you stack health, armor, dodge, ward or a mixture. This really only gives you 5 or 6 different styles of playing the game, because the way you play the game is based on your survivability and attack choice. Of course different classes might appeal better to you based on their skills, ease of progression and how it feels to control the character, but most players prefer one type of playstyle and generally stick to that for a reason.

The game has just released and therefore its long term appeal is definitely dependent on how much and how quickly they add to the end game experience. Whilst the game is enjoying a lot of appeal right now, we’re not too far away from other big ARPG title releases which might unseat a growing game like Last Epoch before it gets a chance to really captivate a core audience long term.

Summary

Overall this is an excellent game, and definitely recommended if you enjoy ARPG gameplay and want to play something new that doesn’t reinvent the genre. The builds and itemisation of the game are excellent, and the visuals match the game’s rivals. There are some great ideas in this game, from the crafting and faction system, to the loot filter and flexibility of the builds available to each class. Indie game developers like Eleventh Hour Games do gaming a great service by challenging the status quo of the triple A studios. It’s incredible that they’ve developed a game that can easily compete with such studios and in many ways, outshines them.

The downsides to the game is sparse content end-game, the need for many QoL improvements and the amount of bugs and glitches that still need to be fixed. However the developer has shown how well they communicate with its players and therefore the trust to do these changes is very high. The question is just how fast they can implement them, and whether the game can hold onto its relevance long term with new releases like Path of Exile 2 on the horizon in 2025. From what I can see so far, the game is highly likely to continue to be a success and maintain a good-sized player base.