Last Epoch is, as has been observed many times, a kind of middle-ground ARPG. You hold down a button to evaporate hordes of enemies from a top down isometric perspective, but, in a step further than Diablo 4, it has more in-depth, any-time crafting for entry level percentage perverts to eke out incremental slivers of health regen vs. damage. At the same time, it’s less complex than Path Of Exile, which is where advanced percentage perverts go when they die. Last Epoch has been in early access for a while now, so there’s a decent chance that you already know what you think of it now it’s in 1.0. If you haven’t yet dipped your toe in, then I can tell you it’s very decent. It makes building an extremely overpowered mega-wizard very easy, and I liked it better than Diablo IV, I think.
Heresy. There’s a large caveat, though. When I played Diablo IV for review I actually had a cool time because I was playing with someone for a lot of it, and we could have nice chats. By contrast, Last Epoch’s review build was running on a siloed test server, and about as densely populated as a strip club on a Tueseday morning. I saw two other players the entire time, so I can’t speak to the seamless drop in, drop out multiplayer being a large feature of most ARPGs. In fairness, if you look at streams of the un-1.0-patched Last Epoch there are people cutting about in the town areas all the time. And in further fairness to the game, it does keep the solitary player in mind.
Last Epoch has a full offline mode, which is a very nice option, and if you’re not the trading-with-player type, the 1.0 patch allows you to join the Circle Of Fortune, an in-game faction that gives you passive loot benefits, improving the quantity and quality of drops from your adventuring around. Most players are going to chose the Merchants’ Guild, which allows you to trade with other players, but it’s nice to give some bennies to the introverts who want to avoid strangers. Both of these factions are late-game stuff, though, and you won’t get the option to join until you reach a level 50-ish area of the Last Epoch. Before that, there’s about 20 hours of story to get through.
And I haven’t gone over the story yet, but like most ARPGs you can pretty safely ignore it, because you are mainly making numbers of ever increasing size pop off melting skeletons and farting plant monsters. Last Epoch’s story is both more entertaining and more confusing than other RPGs, though, because it plays the time travel card (which it presumably stole, from you, in the future). Early on you, in the Divine era of the fantasy world you’re in, help some wisened sage folks called the Keepers to secure three shards of a magical time traveling device. Because there’s a war going on, one of the Keepers decides to hide the time travel MacGuffin in the future, except when you get there the world has been all apocalypsed by a void that mutates people. The story of Last Epoch is thus about pingponging back and forth through time to remedy this.
There’s end-game stuff to keep you ticking over in Last Epoch, apart from whatever the devs release post launch. There are repeatable dungeons, the single-use keys for which are low-chance drops from rare bosses and monsters. In the End Of Time era is the Monolith, a web of alternate timelines that is in fact high level challenge maps that confer buffs if you complete them without dying and, yes, dungeon keys.Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Eleventh Hour Games
Large swathes of the middle of Last Epoch are about defeating the empire of an undead emperor who can bestow immortal unlife on people, so many of the bosses you fight in the future are people you meet in the past. Which is also your present. I think there could have been more fun had with this (the giant lightning crab monster admiral could scream that he always hated you during the boss fight that takes place before you meet him for, chronologically, the first time, sort of thing), but the devs really use the time travel framing to their full advantage vis. setting and enemy design. When you take into account the different time periods in the game, there are a lot of locations in Last Epoch. Snowy mountains with ice monsters, a desert crawling with giant poisonous scorpions, broken aqueducts full of zombie eagle men. You’ll see a lake at the time that it’s the staging ground for a resistance to the empire, with wooden homes and paths on stilts, and then in the future when it’s all corrupted by the void, full of mutated cultists.
I found streamlining my character builds in Last Epoch to be much easier than in other ARPGs. There are five broad classes which break down into three “masteries” – my rogue could have been a blades specialist or have a falcon best friend (a new addition for 1.0), but I chose to be an archer – and you can change mastery whenever you like similar to Diablo IV’s on-the-fly respeccing, although you character will be class-locked. Along with that you have Skill Specialization, eventually allowing you to specialise in five of your favourites to level up their own specific little skill trees. So yeah, skills have skill trees. For example, I had the ability to summon two ballistas on the battlefield, and their skill tree included things like my own buffs applying to the ballistas at a reduced percentage, getting armour, shots piercing multiple enemies, and so on.
But wait, there’s more! You have a passive skill tree for your class and mastery, too. A different rogue build might go in for stacking bleed damage or coated blades. After I’d been playing a while I built my archer around health regeneration, since I was playing alone. The passive ability Draining Arrows gives you health whenever a bow attack hits an enemy, so I combined that with Sapping Strikes, which leeches health whenever you use an ability with no mana cost. All of this lined up perfectly with my main bow attack, which had zero mana cost. I crafted gear with health regen and arrow damage in mind, and pretty soon I had an invincible archer who could stand still and shoot hordes of enemies and giant bosses as they rained hellfire down upon her. You can do fun things like that with a bunch of classes. I enjoyed trying to build a mage who had as little mana cost for spells as humanly possible, making him a sort of magical perpetual energy machine.
The difficulty does rubberband a bit if you can’t be arsed doing some of the side quests and end up under-levelled for the area, but if you spend valuable time engaging with the crafting and passive skills, the combat requires about the same amount of active thought as walking. You’ll quickly kick the habit of picking up any loot on the ground that isn’t something for your build, because it’s not about selling gear, it’s about improving things that are specifically useful for you.
In contrast to the streamlined crafting and levelling, there are rough edges here and there. Quest markers blipped out of existence sometimes, and while you can resurrect on (rare) death immediately, Last Epoch gave me a sort of res roulette, spawning me almost exactly where I was standing when I died, back at the start of the map, or sometimes at the nearest fast travel waypoint. It also, for some reason, completely wipes map exploration whenever you enter an area again, even if it’s a place you’ve cleared before, or a town hub. Sometimes I got a percentage on a boss health bar, sometimes a bar with no percentage, and sometimes no bar at all. These are annoyances one would hope to see sanded out over years of early access.
Still, it’s a very worthy buy, and I hope the devs keep it up with the post-game improvements. Mostly, I really like the high drama and high fantasy of Last Epoch. It’s much less depressing to stare at for hours as you blast mercenaries and ice wolves into trembling ragdoll corpses that some of its contemporaries, and the the mid-complexity crafting and gear systems, along with the character building, makes it easy and, dare I say it, actually fun to engage with minor percentage increases. I never thought I’d see the day.
This review is based on a review build of the game provided by developers Eleventh Hour Games.