[h1]The game is good. That's what makes the people running it so hard to forgive.[/h1]
Not recommended. And I want to be clear up front that this is a good game, because that's the entire problem.
I've been playing on and off since before it launched. I know these systems. I like these systems.
It's free-to-play, so I can't even tell you not to buy it. I'm telling you something worse: don't give it your time. Free-to-play doesn't mean free. It means the price is hidden further in, and you won't find it until you've sunk a hundred hours into something you don't want to walk away from.
[h2]What they got right[/h2]
Combat feels great. No lag, no stutter, and it looks genuinely good for something that also runs on a phone. The build systems are deep — runes, a zodiac tree, jewels, charms, relics, Lacrima. Crafting alone has over forty essence types before you reach the second crafting layer.
The progression drip is properly tuned. Almost every map hands you something: a small upgrade, a material, one step forward. That sounds minor and isn't — reward cadence is what most ARPGs get wrong, and a run that pays nothing is how a player quietly stops logging in.
And the quality of life beats games ten times its budget. Hotkey to open chests: walk up, press F, done. Better still, you don't pick up loot at all — your pet hoovers it off the ground while you keep killing. It has ruined every ARPG that doesn't have it for me.
[h2]Then the bill arrives[/h2]
You get 300 inventory slots. Roughly 200 are permanently colonized by crafting materials you can't delete, because the crafting system they designed requires you to hoard them.
So you need another tab. The tab costs 500 rubies. The smallest ruby pack that reaches 500 costs $45.
Forty-five dollars. Not for power, not cosmetics, not a shortcut. Pockets. The game itself costs nothing, and somewhere to put your things costs the price of a full retail release. Want tabs organized properly? You're past a hundred.
It keeps going. Auction house items move for real money. Progression multipliers are sold outright — free player gets four of a thing, paying player gets six. That's not cosmetic, that's throughput.
[h2]The difference between a shop and a tollbooth[/h2]
I'm not against monetization. Torchlight Infinite is stuffed with things to buy and you can ignore every one. Path of Exile's is almost entirely optional, and the game is so good people hand over money anyway. I've done it. Cheerfully.
All three of these are free-to-play. That's exactly the point. The model isn't the problem. The calibration is.
A shop sells you things you're allowed to say no to. A tollbooth sells you the ability to keep going.
And the mechanism here is cleverer and worse than a "buy power" button. The endgame of this game IS crafting. Crafting runs on forty-plus essence types plus traces, memories, jewels, charms and cards, and you must hoard all of them because you never know which one the next recipe eats. That's the whole endgame loop.
Then they gave you 300 slots and put the 301st behind forty-five dollars.
They didn't paywall the endgame. They made the endgame's raw material physically impossible to store. Same wall, better lawyers.
And look where the free convenience went. The campaign — thirteen acts of running in a straight line, the part I wanted to skip — has a helpful arrow telling you where to run next. The endgame, the part I came for, is where the meter starts running. They subsidized the boring half and put a tollbooth on the good half.
Here's what kills me. I was ready to pay. Three dollars, five, ten, for quality of life, happily. That customer was standing right there with his wallet out. They walked past him to shake down somebody with a storage problem and a hundred bucks.
That isn't greed getting punished by the market. That's greed being bad at greed.
[h2]Quest Guy[/h2]
Thirteen mandatory acts. I clear the Path of Exile campaign in about six hours on a fresh account. This took me over twelve, and nine of those hours were running in a straight line.
Every map is the same skeleton. Walk away from the boss to do a side thing. Report to Quest Guy. He teleports you to another branch. Now walk to the boss.
And Quest Guy is everywhere, following you across the map like a manager doing rounds. Then one day he decides he lives in town, so you travel there, find him, and he tells you to go back to the exact spot you were both standing in ninety seconds ago and kill the boss.
[h2]The noise, and the loop it feeds[/h2]
The loot filter is a war crime. Your screen is a landfill and the options are nowhere near enough to dig out. In this genre the loot filter IS the interface.
Now put that next to the pet. Your pet picks up everything. The filter can't stop it. So the garbage doesn't just cover the floor — it gets briskly delivered into the 300 slots you already can't afford to expand. They built an automated trash intake system feeding an inventory they charge forty-five dollars to enlarge.
That's not an oversight. That's a business model with a mascot.
The achievements have no chill either. Walked three meters. Killed three monsters. Congratulations, you are alive.
[h2]For summoner players[/h2]
I play minions exclusively, so here's the honest number: you cap at five. No spectre screens, no skeleton walls, no zombie tide — a small squad, and you pour everything you own into making it hit harder.
The two families they do have are designed well, but weak relative to the meta and quietly nerfed between seasons. Doable. Hard mode. Now you know.
[h2]And then they locked Russian players out of the game[/h2]
Not an outage. Not a bug. They shut the door on an entire country.
Paying customers, with characters built across seasons and money spent in that same cash shop. One morning the game stopped opening and everything they built was on the other side of the door.
I don't live there. My account works fine. I'm writing it anyway, because look at what that decision accomplished. It deleted people's save files. That's the entire result. Not one policy anywhere moved a millimeter and nobody with real power missed a single meal over it.
Online games were the last room left where people who aren't allowed to agree on anything else still stood on the same map and argued about builds. Somebody in an office priced that at less than a compliance checkbox.
[h2]This review was going to be green[/h2]
As a game, I'm satisfied. The loop works, the builds are deep, and I keep coming back. On gameplay alone I was going to click Recommend and write the monetization section as a warning. Greed is annoying, but greed is just a business, and you can argue with a business.
Then they took an entire country's accounts away.
I don't know the individuals who signed that, and I'm not going to stand on a store page swearing at strangers. But I know precisely what was done. And there's a word for confiscating what people paid for based on which passport they carry. It isn't a nice word. I'm not going to type it. I don't have to — you thought of it already.
So the thumb goes down. Not for the loot filter. Not for the forty-five dollar pockets. For that.
Nobody had to be a hero. This is entertainment. The bar was: don't take people's things. They cleared thirteen acts of level design and could not clear that.
There's a genuinely good game buried in here, being slowly strangled by the people who own it. That's the tragedy. Not that it's bad — that it isn't.
Open the door. Fix the filter. Then we can argue about the price of pockets like normal people.
[b]P.S.[/b] To whichever executive signed that region block: I took your mother to dinner first. Lovely evening. She had the sea bass, we split a dessert, I walked her to her car.
That's the entire postscript. I'm a gentleman.
She says you never call.
