I wanted to wait for the 1.0 release before writing this but the last trailers and interviews have proved to me that they don't want to change anything about this.
This entire game feels like one gigantic pile of wasted potential.
Gorgeous visuals smeared by never-ending and ludicrously over the top visual effects, ruining performance and resulting in worse visual clarity than even poe1 (and that is not an exaggeration, they somehow managed to make it worse), presumably because the vfx artists don't know when to stop.
Great boss fights ruined by awful balancing, all those cool fights don't matter when even my crappy builds can melt them in 3 seconds.
Fun new skills and interactions, except most of them are either pointlessly limited by obnoxious conditionals, stupidly long unmodifiable attack times or are purposefully designed to be useless unless used as part of a combo, severely restricting versatility and build diversity for no good reason.
Waste of time mechanics like item identification and pointless systems like sprinting are still a thing in 2026. And yes, they added sprinting that blocks all other actions and stuns you on hit, in a power fantasy arpg, instead of making the player even a little bit faster by default. It feels like those only exists because some of the devs cannot contain their diablo 2 fetish.
Designing character rigs and animations to make them fully compatible and properly playable with WASD movement and controllers, only to never make use of this whole new freedom of movement, outside of some ranged skills. Most melee skills in this are pretty much the same slap fight they have always been in all other games of this type, while most of the remaining ones can only move you forwards.
And my biggest overall complaint, for a game that is supposed to exist alongside PoE1, is that there is not enough of a difference between those two games. As it stands now, PoE2 is a slower, clunkier version of the old game, which replaces one button spam builds with spamming a fixed and forced skill rotation and pretending that this is somehow skill based gameplay or a real difference. The progression is no different either, in the end you still only want to be able to complete maps/trials/bosses as fast as possible, there is no other goal or playstyle. There are no real tests of skill or anything else that would push builds into any other direction, it's all still about speed and simplicity, just as before.
TL;DR It's the same thing but clunky. There is basically no skill-based gameplay, no innovation, worse visual clarity and performance, a lot less content (obviously), all in the same environment and progression system that rewards speed, automation and overall build simplicity more than anything else. And all of it seems intentional.
Overall it may not be a truly bad game, just kinda mediocre. And i cannot recommend it when games such as PoE 1 and Grim Dawn still exist. Those do pretty much everything this one does, but better.
It's just a worse PoE1.
