Last Epoch may be the solution to all your Diablo-shaped problems

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SHOULD I PLAY LAST EPOCH?

Definitely check out Last Epoch if you’ve been left a bit cold by Diablo IV’s lackluster seasonal updates. Last Epoch has a lot of the good stuff that makes Diablo work at the base level, but it adds a better leveling and skill development system and combat that rarely feels mindless the way Blizzard’s action RPG frequently does. Toss in some great environments and a super-cool time-traveling premise, and Last Epoch ends up punching well above its weight class.

TIME PLAYED

I played just over five hours of Last Epoch, exclusively as a rogue character who I eventually developed into a falconry expert. While the rogue can unlock a skill that allows her to dual-wield melee weapons, I ended up opting for a ranged build, sending my incredibly murderous falcon to do constant damage to the biggest threats while my automatic ballista and I managed crowd control during bigger fights. After beginning in the pleasant and sunny Divine Era, I traveled through rifts in time to multiple periods: a dystopia known as the Ruined Era thirteen hundred years in the future, a time in the ancient past six thousand years ago, and even to the end of time itself. With five base classes, each with three possible mastery paths to explore and their own unique skill trees and specializations, I’ve only scratched the surface of Last Epoch at this point.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT LAST EPOCH?

• Combat that kept me guessing. In the early hours of Last Epoch, I had to approach combat carefully, because it was easy to get overwhelmed. The game constantly threw tricky enemy combos at me, mixing ranged attackers with swarms of melee foes who would try to pin me down. That meant I had to be careful to stay mobile and use all my available abilities as often as possible. As I progressed, I found that I was enjoying the rhythm of combat more than I did in Diablo IV. Last Epoch isn’t significantly more challenging than Diablo IV, but I had to be more cautious and deliberate about what I was doing. I couldn’t slip into the mindless, zoned-out clickfest mode I experience in Diablo IV.

• The time travel thing is really neat. I won’t spoil the story itself, but the fact that I got to travel between eras was a delightful way to learn about a magical fantasy world. Each era felt completely different, as each location changed dramatically between the various eras. The Divine Era felt like a fairy-tale world with the sun dancing through the trees, while in the Ruined Era, the world was plunged into inky darkness, with demonic tentacles emerging from fissures to pull unsuspecting soldiers into the chasms.

• Endless build variety. I had the options to develop my rogue character into a blade dancer, a marksman, or a falconer, but that was only the beginning of the customization options I had. As I progressed, I unlocked specialization slots, and I could use these to further develop skills I already had. For example, I specialized in the rogue’s cinder strike skill, which is a three-hit attack with added fire damage. As I used the skill and advanced my character, I got points to spend in cinder strike’s progression tree, which I could use to add extra damage, reduce its cooldown, or change fundamental characteristics of the attack (such as making it a one-hit strike that cost more mana but hit much harder). Every skill has a progression tree of its own, so the amount of build tweaking I could do was enormous.

And that’s all without even touching the incredibly deep gear crafting system! Once I located a forge, I could use materials I found to tune just about every aspect and affix on my weapons and armor to my heart’s content. Every crafting upgrade is chance-based, so it reminded me a bit of the randomized system found in Nioh 2, but for dedicated players, there’s effectively no real limit on how much fiddling can be done to get the perfect gear loadout.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT LAST EPOCH?

• Scene transitions. Moving from one area to another in Last Epoch always triggered a lengthy loading screen. This got particularly frustrating when I changed areas by accident by stepping in a designated zone, which happened much more frequently than it should have. There was never a confirmation box asking me whether I wanted to move to the next area, so sometimes I would get to a new location, start getting my bearings, and accidentally step back into the transition area to the previous zone. Just like that, one long loading screen turned into three long loading screens, and all my momentum was sapped away.

• No truly memorable characters so far. While I enjoyed the setting and time traveling aspect of Last Epoch, I struggled to get very invested in the story. The game didn’t spend a lot of time introducing me to characters or giving me a reason to care about them. It’s not that it’s a bad story, but without that more emotional, personal touch, I never really cared about the outcome.

PLATFORM TESTED

PC via Steam.