Game:

Grim Dawn (2016)

Category:

Review

Duration: 5:25

138 views

5

Join me on discord! https://discord.gg/K4gBgV
Grim Dawn is an action RPG featuring highly customizable characters, multiple difficulties and a very rewarding loot system. It is available on Steam and is currently priced at 25 euro’s.

Hello everyone. My name is Ekay and you’re watching EkayTech. Before I dive into this review I do want to start off by saying that this review is based on a single play through taking me about 12 hours to complete. I will be looking at the journey through the base game and will not be touching upon post game or expansion based content. Having said that, let’s talk about Grim Dawn.

The game opens up a couple months after an event known as “ The Grim Dawn”. Ethereal beings have begun pouring into the mortal realm and possessing humans as a means of living. As the game starts a cut scene plays showing one of them possessing you. Fortunately the being leaves while under the threat of being executed

Shortly after you learn you are capable of opening the same rifts these beings use to travel. This sparks both interest and fear into the fellow villagers. While gaining their trust you complete tasks around the area and start using your newfound power as a means to take the fight to them.

Now before we dive into gameplay mechanics I do want to touch upon the game’s difficulty settings. As you create a character you have the option to choose a difficulty. Initially only Normal and Veteran are available. Normal being for players new to action rpg’s and Veteran, as the name suggests, being a harder version of normal.

Once you complete the game on normal or veteran mode, the Elite difficulty unlocks and upon completing Elite, the Ultimate difficulty becomes available. Each difficulty acts as a new game plus feature allowing you to restart the game with your character intact. Monsters will be more difficult, higher level and drop better loot. After completing Veteran mode I was only level 38. Leaving more than enough room for higher difficulty playthroughs.

Given the top down perspective, the performance in Grim Dawn is pretty great. I can’t recall a single time I dropped below 60 frames per second with everything as maxed out as possible. I’m pretty confident this game runs on some rather potato setups.



Graphically the game looks a bit better than other games in the genre, but doesn’t blow you away by any means. There is a good variety of environments including forests, mountains, cellars, villages, snowy areas, a variety of demonic looking areas and many more. I haven’t ever felt like I was sick of an area before being able to move on to another one. The only thing most areas had in common is that they felt rather Grim, but hey, with it being in the title, you can’t expect a whole lot else. The sound design works perfectly fine with the graphics as it’s generally more somber music. This is not to say that the music is sad or boring but rather perfectly in tune with the graphics and setting of the game.

While the game takes you through a pretty linear path in the main story, there is plenty of room to complete sidequests, farm faction points for rewards, hunt hero monsters for loot or do any other standard rpg task.

As you level up through whatever means you prefer, you gain a plethora of customization options. First off you get one stat point that you can invest into one of 3 stat lines. Second you get skill point to, you guessed it, unlock skills. At the beginning of the game you select one class from a pool and at level 10 you select a secondary one to compliment it. It’s up to you to choose what combination to run and where you want to invest your points. There’s a huge amount of possible combinations in this game.

There is however more than just level based progression. Throughout the map are shrines which you can complete to get devotion points. These can be invested in an almost Path of Exile like skilltree (though much smaller) to unlock further bonuses that can be applied to regular skills.

Finally there is of course gear. There is no online trading, there is only you going around filling up your inventory with that good loot. There’s an insane amount of stats in the game and all drops seem to be completely RNG based. This means there’s a lot of excitement in finding cool loot and the urge to farm just that little bit more is most definitely present. Fortunately there is a very good loot system allowing you to only see what you want to see. This goes from removing rarities from the loot table as well as looking only for specific stats or weapon types.

I have found Grim Dawn to be well worth my money and played my 12 hours over 3 days. It was hard putting the game down and leveling up just once more was always an interesting prospect. I do highly recommend picking this game especially since it’s priced at only 25 euros on Steam.

Other Statistics