Review: Path of Exile

Blizzard's "Diablo" series was a huge success so far, but the latest installment Diablo III was bombed by critics, especially on the hype before it got release after long years of waiting. I bought myself a copy of Diablo III since I was an avid fan of the hack and slash game. Though I finished the story of the game, it still lacked the essence of the previous installments Diablo and Diablo II. While thinking of other hack and slash games, I stumbled upon POE(Path of Exile). At first glance I was sure that this was a rip-off of Diablo III, but I tried it and low and behold it has its charm of its own.

Path of Exile(PoE) is a free to play game that only needs the client and an account. You can choose between the starter classes "Marauder, Duelist, Ranger, Shadow, Witch, and Templar". When the game is finished and you want a class with much more challenge, one can try out the Scion which incorporates all of the three main attributes "Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence". One more thing to look out is that the main client itself is small, though a word of warning that updates for patches usually are big, it ranges from 300MB to 1GB and above.

Another thing that made me interested was the skill tree that is more simillar to Final Fantasy's MMO. Instead of a fix skill tree like the Diablo installments one can get creative with the vast skills that are available for each and every hero class available, though ofcourse the starting point would still be on different sides of the skill tree.

The storyline has it's own twists and charm. As the games name states, a player would pick a class of exile and would be stranded in an untamed land known as Wraeclast: the land of the damned. Players need to finish a series of quests to help the inhabitants and to uncover the mysteries of the vast and wild continent. With monsters, mystic beings, and corrupted soldiers that would want to take your life.

One of the features that players can enjoy is the game modes available. Unlike Diablo's hardcore mode where you can't use a character once dead, PoE's hardcore mode is different. While you can choose this game mode from the very start, even if your character dies you can still use them, though the game mode would be turned into standard game play. Don't cry yet because as a compensation all of your items in your inventory will still be there, but the items in the storage can only be accessed if a player creates another hardcore character.

That said and done, we can give it an overall score of 7.5/10. If you find yourself bored with the same old MMOs you can certainly try out this and see for yourself if it deserves the credit.