One of the most brutally mediocre games i've ever played. The perfect 5/10 on a true 10-point scale, average across the board. I've played all the classes and taken several of them into end-game across launch, Beneath Ancient Skies, and now Shattered Omens.
To get my pedigree out of the way, i love ARPGs. It's my absolute favorite genre and has been since Diablo 1 on the Playstation back in the late 90s. I've played almost every example of the genre that exists and have sunk a significant amount of time into all the current titans of the genre. All this to say that i know pretty well what how i feel about the genre and the goods and bads.
Almost nothing about Last Epoch stands out in any way. Aesthetically and stylistically it's generic medieval fantasy. Setting-wise the time travel stuff is nice on paper but ultimately they don't do anything interesting with it. Story-wise it's nothing you haven't seen before. Gameplay-wise it's about as generic ARPG as it gets, slightly more depth than Diablo 2 but less than Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, etc. Like i could sit here and list point by point every single grievance i have with the game but ultimately the big things are this: The campaign is FAR too long for me to want to carry multiple characters per season into the endgame which isn't interesting either.
Itemization is borderline non-existent, nothing in the base game will exceed the items you get from seasonal stuff, a Rare item from a normal monster has 3-4 modifiers with like 20% to a few stats or melee damage and then Corrupted, Experimental, or Nemesis items come in with the steel chair with 5-8 modifiers that can reach into 100-200% boosts to stats, which also applies to Uniques, so you ignore literally everything that doesn't drop from those. Uniques themselves are also incredibly boring, they drop constantly and none of them are build-defining or really change how anything works. You'll still have the same handful of crazy modifier seasonal items from half-way through the campaign all the way through chunks of the endgame.
This is in part because the class system is bland. You get a base class that you barely spend any time with and then it gets replaced by one of three subclasses. The problem is, when you unlock a subclass you also get access to the first half the other subclasses passive trees and most of your skills come from the base class. Combine this with class mechanics being fairly uninteresting and not really impacting moment-to-moment gameplay and the skill modifying system letting you swing any skill to be more like a subclass (i.e letting it deal Void damage or Fire damage like Void Knight or Forge Guard) and it results in the whole system being fairly flavorless. A Forge Guard doesn't feel fundamentally any different than a Void Knight because the only real change is one generates Forge Weapon summons (i should say struggles to because even if you build entirely into generating them you'll barely be able to keep them up) and the other has big Void AoEs, otherwise it's 80% the same skills and passives.
Seasonal stuff is also kinda bad. Last season was opening portals into the dinosaur timeline to fight through the same handful of enemies on the same 2-3 tile layouts to fight the same boss to grind out currency for the gear, again which is better than anything you'll get from the rest of the normal game. This season is just a significantly worse copy of Breach from Path of Exile that adds Corrupted modifiers that work exactly like they do in PoE like being unable to Craft on them (forgot to mention crafting, it just lets you switch out affixes but it's a pointless system you'll never really use and won't make anything better than Seasonal items, making un-modifiable items kinda confirms to me that they're giving up on it). All the seasonal stuff can pop up on almost every map you enter so it's simultaneously just single small events that don't last long and aren't interesting but it's also all you'll be doing and the best way to get items.
It's also just not a very challenging game. Melee, magic, or ranged there's nothing that can really step up to you, nothing that'll last for more than a couple seconds and if you're playing a Minion build the game is literally playing itself for you, all you have to do is move from mob to mob while everything melts, you'll never die and neither will your Minions. I also think their monetization is gross and i ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate that they advertise sales and stuff constantly on the left side of the screen, it's incredibly obtrusive and just pushes me further from wanting to spend more time or any money with the game. They're also going to start charging you for classes with the expansion in however many years (because their content release is absolutely glacial) despite promises that paid content would be strictly cosmetic, yay Krafton acquisition but bluntly with the way monetization was before EHG would have gone this route anyway.
I could keep going but i hope you're picking up what i'm throwing down here. If you grab it on sale it's not the worst time waster i've ever played but Diablo 2, Path of Exile/2, and Grim Dawn still exist and there's a myriad of other games in the genre like Dungeon Siege, Titan Quest, Torchlight 2, etc that you could revisit for more fun than this. Rarely have i been more uncompelled to play a game than this one, there's just no soul, sauce, or juice.
