After playing the Diablo 4 beta on March 17th-19th and 24th-26th, I got the itch to play ARPG's again, as it was tough not being able to play Diablo 4 now that the beta weekends have finished.

I decided to take a look around and see what ARPG's are available to play that were about the same as Diablo 4, but not as complicated as Path of Exile. That's when I found out about Last Epoch.

A Balance between Diablo 4 and Path of Exile

As much as I like Path of Exile, playing it can be extremely daunting. Ultimately, it's complex skill tree's and the increasing number of mechanics available in the game cause me to stop playing the game after a few hours. However, outside of Diablo 3, which I didn't want to play again, I didn't know which ARPG I could play that would be fun, without requiring to whip out spreadsheets to figure out my character build.

After some research, I learned about Last Epoch, an ARPG that has been in early access 2019, and plans to release the game in 2023. Now, I usually try to avoid early access games, as recently, a lot of companies release rather unfinished games, and play it off as an early access, but charge full price for the game. As much as I want to some games that have been announced, I'd rather wait until it is fully released.

With Last Epoch, if I learned about it back in 2019, 2020, heck, even 2021 or 2022, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. But, since the game is nearing release, and reviews have been extremely positive as of late, I decided to give it a try.

Holy cow, am I glad I picked it up.

At the time of writing this post, I am currently sitting at just under 20 hours of play time. I just got my character to the "end game", and am enjoying a lot about this game.

The reason why I consider this game a balance between Diablo 4 and Path of Exile is that the skills are pretty straight forward, but has skill trees for each skills that could drastically change your character.

For example, I am playing a mage who is spec'd into the Spellblade mastery. I dual wield swords and run around utilizing a melee lightning skill that I spent skill points into making sure it gives me Ward, this games version of Energy Shield/Shield, on each strike. This vastly improves my survivability, while still being pretty fun since I utilize other skills that increase my melee attack speed. I'm basically just running around and shredding monsters, and I love that!

But, even though that is how I built my character, I could easily respec skillpoints into making the build vastly different, even with keeping the same skills.

Still can't wait for Diablo 4

Last Epoch is definitely worth the $35 I spent on it. But, I doubt it will keep me interested for the next two months. I was shocked at how much I enjoyed the beta, and I definitely want to play the full game on release. Hopefully it does not disappoint!

However, if you are in the same boat as me, or you are just looking for a different game to play and you like the ARPG genre, I definitely recommend checking out Last Epoch.

Also, in case anyone was wondering, the game does run fairly well on Linux, although for me, I need to play the game at Low/Very Low graphics, otherwise it gets a bit choppy. On windows, my Zephyrus G14 with an RTX 3060 can run it on Ultra graphics. But, their is so much happening on the screen that I rarely notice the drop in graphics when I am playing on Linux.