I have 1.6k hours on PS5 and another 2k on PC, so I think it is finally time to leave a review.
- There is no other game that can induce this much rage and bliss in me at the same time. Playing PoE means constantly alternating between praising the developers as geniuses and wondering whether a monkey, homeschooled by a pigeon and armed with a crayon, could design better systems and leagues. GGG can release a genuinely excellent league, then follow it with something as bad as Keepers or Allflame and somehow still appear proud of the result. I have no idea whether their QA team blindly approves everything, whether their playtesters are ignored, or whether everyone occasionally loses the ability to recognize obvious problems. This cannot always be defended with "We take risks, because otherwise every league would be boring". My sweet summer child, veteran players knew within the first 150 hours that your league was terrible. Then you buffed it, and it was still terrible.
- PoE1 no longer feels like a game being developed entirely for the people who actually enjoy PoE1. More PoE2 mechanics, ideas, pacing decisions, visual clutter, friction, and experimental systems keep bleeding into it. Instead of preserving the identity of the game that built their audience, GGG increasingly seems to use PoE1 as a convenient testing ground for PoE2. Stop trying to fix what made the game successful just because it does not match the philosophy of your newer project. If I will want to play PoE2, which I like too, I will play PoE2. Not a reskinned version with worse graphics and rewards in PoE.
- There is also no truly challenging, structured endgame in PoE. If you cannot create your own goals and find enjoyment in optimization for its own sake, you will eventually become bored. The entire endgame is a repetition loop. You juice maps, kill Ubers, farm currency, upgrade your build, and then repeat the same content with larger numbers and often mediocre rewards.
You need to be a very particular kind of autistic, natural-born tinkerer, theorycrafter, and min-maxer, to keep enjoying it for thousands of hours. Personally, I can spend entire evenings crafting items, planning builds, calculating modifiers, and optimizing systems. The game itself is often boring. Understanding and breaking the game is the fun part.
That leads to another problem. Once your character becomes powerful and you finally understand how to juice maps properly, the game stops looking like an action RPG and starts resembling a graphics-card stress test.
Ten thousand monsters spawn at once. Fifty glowing orbs chase you across the map. A hundred overlapping ground effects cover every surface. Millions of visual and sound effects go off simultaneously, most of them contributing nothing except noise, confusion, and irritation.
Would you like to see your character? Understand what killed you? React to an enemy attack? Play Solitaire.
