Last Epoch is, as has been noted many times, a sort of mid-tier ARPG. You hold down a button to ward off hordes of enemies from an isometric top-down perspective, but it takes it a step further than Diablo 4, with more in-depth, at-will crafting for beginners to squeeze out incremental slivers of health regeneration relative to damage. At the same time, it’s less sophisticated than Path Of Exile, where advanced perverts get hit upon death. Last Epoch has been in Early Access for a while now, so there’s a good chance you already know what you think of it now that it’s in version 1.0. If you haven’t dipped your toe in yet, I can tell you it’s very decent. It makes building an incredibly powerful mega-wizard very effortless, and I enjoyed it more than Diablo IV, I think.
Heresy. There is a substantial caveat though. When I played Diablo IV for review purposes, I actually had a good time because I played With someone too much, and we could have a nice chat. For comparison, the Last Epoch test build was running on an isolated test server and was as densely populated as a strip club on a Tuesday morning. I saw two other players the entire time, so I can’t say that seamlessly switching between multiplayer and drop-ins is a substantial feature of most action RPGs. To be fair, if you look at the streams from the unpatched 1.0 Last Epoch, you’ll see people constantly hanging around areas of the city. And to be fair, the game does have the lone player in mind.
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Last Epoch has a full offline mode, which is a really frosty feature, and if you’re not the type of player who trades with other players, patch 1.0 lets you join the Circle Of Fortune, an in-game faction that gives you passive loot benefits, increasing the quantity and quality of loot from your adventures. Most players will opt for the Merchants’ Guild, which lets you trade with other players, but it’s nice to give a little extra to introverts who want to avoid strangers. Both of these factions are tardy in the game, though, and you won’t be able to join until you’ve reached level 50 in Last Epoch. Before that, there’s about 20 hours of story to get through.
And I haven’t even discussed the plot yet, but like most action RPGs, you can ignore it because you’re mostly just making increasingly gigantic numbers jump out of melting skeletons and farting plant monsters. Last Epoch’s story is both more fun and more confusing than other RPGs because it plays with the time travel card (which it probably stole from you in the future). At the beginning, in the divine era of the fantasy world you find yourself in, you support wise sages called Guardians secure three shards of a magical time travel device. Because there is a war going onone of the Keepers decides to hide a time-traveling MacGuffin in the future, but by the time you get there, the world is already completely apocalyptic due to the void mutating people. So Last Epoch’s story is about ping-ponging back and forth through time to fix that.
There’s a lot of endgame stuff in Last Epoch to keep you going, beyond what the developers put out post-launch. There are repeatable dungeons where one-time keys are unlikely to be obtained from uncommon bosses and monsters. In the End Of Time era, there’s the Monolith, a network of alternate timelines that are essentially high-level challenge maps that grant buffs if you complete them without dying, and, yes, dungeon keys.Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/Eleventh Hour Games
Large swaths of the middle section of Last Epoch are about defeating the empire of an undead emperor who can grant people immortal unlife, so a lot of the bosses you fight in the future are people you meet in the past. Which is also your present. I think you could have more fun with that (the giant thundercrab monster admiral could scream that he’s always hated you during a boss fight that takes place before you meet him, chronologically, for the first time, something like that), but the developers really exploit the time travel framework to their advantage in terms of setting and enemy design. When you consider the different time periods in the game, there are a lot of locations in Last Epoch. Snowy mountains with ice monsters, a desert full of giant poisonous scorpions, broken aqueducts full of zombie eagles. You will see the lake at a time when it was a gathering place for the resistance against the empire, with wooden houses and paths on stilts, and later, in the future, when all this has been contaminated by the void, the place will be full of mutant cultists.
I found that improving my character builds in Last Epoch was much easier than in other ARPGs. There are five broad classes, which are divided into three “masteries”—my rogue could be a blade specialist or have a falcon best friend (fresh in 1.0), but I chose an archer—and you can change masteries at will, similar to Diablo IV, where changing masteries is done on the fly, although your character will be class-locked. On top of that, you have a skill mastery, which eventually lets you specialize in five favorites to level up their own little skill trees. So yes, skills have skill trees. For example, I had the ability to summon two ballistae on the battlefield, and their skill tree included things like my own buffs that worked on the ballistae at a reduced percentage, gaining armor, arrows that pierced multiple enemies, etc.
But wait, that’s not all! You have a passive skill tree for your class and mastery. Another rogue build might involve stacking bleed damage or coated blades. After playing for a while, I built an archer around health regeneration because I was playing by myself. The passive ability Draining Arrows gives you health every time your bow attack hits an enemy, so I combined it with Sapping Strikes, which drains health every time you exploit an ability for no mana cost. All of this meshed perfectly with my main bow attack, which had zero mana cost. I built my loadout with health regeneration and arrow damage in mind, and soon I had an invincible archer who could stand still and shoot hordes of enemies and giant bosses while they rained hellfire on him. You can do frosty stuff like that with multiple classes. I enjoyed trying to build a mage who had the lowest possible mana cost for spells, making him a kind of magical perpetual energy machine.
The difficulty level does get a bit higher if you don’t feel like doing some of the side quests and end up underleveled for an area, but if you put valuable time into crafting and passive skills, combat requires about as much dynamic thinking as walking around. You’ll quickly get out of the habit of picking up loot from the ground that isn’t really for your build, because it’s not about selling gear, it’s about upgrading things that are specifically useful to you.
In contrast to the improved crafting and leveling, there are some hiccups here and there. Quest markers would sometimes disappear, and while you could revive immediately after a (uncommon) death, Last Epoch gave me a sort of res roulette, respawning me almost exactly where I was standing when I died, back at the start of the map, or sometimes at the nearest brisk travel point. For some reason, it completely removes map exploration when you re-enter an area, even if it’s a spot you’ve previously cleared or the center of town. Sometimes I’d get a percentage on a boss’s health bar, sometimes a bar with no percentage, and sometimes no bar at all. These are annoying things that would be nice to see smoothed out over the years of Early Access.
Still, it’s a very worthwhile purchase, and I hope the developers keep up the level of improvement after the game is finished. First of all, I really like the high drama and high fantasy of Last Epoch. It’s a lot less depressing to watch for hours on end as you smash mercenaries and ice wolves into quivering ragdoll corpses than some of its contemporaries, and the medium-complexity crafting and equipment systems, along with the character building, make the game effortless and, dare I say it, really fun to play with petite percentage increases. I never thought I’d see the day.
This review is based on the version of the game provided by the developers at Eleventh Hour Games.
