You’ll spend the first four hours of this game fighting through ruined stonework villages that used to have local economy, rescuing people who used to have jobs, and brutally murdering a bunch of zombies and mutated local wildlife subsumed by the Aether.
The world of Grim Dawn is a fallen Holy Roman Empire that should have seen it coming dark, closely cropped woods, notes of mud, cold air, pine, and horseshit, and hard men and women who have seen their lives ruined by the essential arrogance of the great, bloated, easily-cannibalized empire that ruled over all of them. The Victorian thing mainly comes because of the somewhat ubiquitous Puritan-style hats that many of the earlier-game characters can be seen wearing, and perhaps a certain Anglophilia that the game does not particularly have interest in. You’ll see Grim Dawn normally described as ‘Victorian’ in its sensibilities, but the game is actually post-apocalyptic Teutonic. Please examine and enjoy the degree to which these numbers go up. And if you’re someone who frequents this space, you know how good it feels to make numbers go up. It’s a game about walking around, killing things, and finding loot that replaces your current loot in a way that makes the numbers go up.
And yet, the smaller team with the narrower purview at Crate Entertainment has put up a worthy contender for players who don’t want to engage in so much free-to-play economy grind nonsense. Grinding Gear Games has done fairly well for themselves. They’ve gotten to the point where, pre-COVID, they had their own annual fan con in New Zealand. Now, Path of Exile is a game worthy of its own review, and probably a better game than Grim Dawn it’s certainly a more successful one, because it’s a live service game run by some of the most impressive business-model schemers in the industry. With Diablo III more or less in legacy mode and that franchise in a holding pattern until Blizzard deigns to say anything more about Diablo IV, the main competitor for Grim Dawn is Path of Exile. And I’ve named Hades my personal Game of the Year in two different years. The only game I can think of that did better by this model is Hades.
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It hit full release in early 2016 and has been live-supported since then by what should be industry best-practices. It is one of the great successes of Early Access it came out so long ago that I don’t remember what I paid for it when it was originally put on offer, but I bought its two expansions the day they came out for $30 apiece. If you’re wondering if “Boots of Unseeing Swiftness” are a “Boots of Blinding Speed” reference, I have either good or bad news.
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Grim Dawn, on the other hand, has been plugging along for some seven years now, from the Early Access date - but some ten years from when Crate Entertainment managed to license the Titan Quest engine from whatever was left of Iron Lore.
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That lineage is respectable, but more importantly, it is respected - the other great single-player PC Diablo -like, Torchlight, dropped its second installment to slight indifference and its third installment to near-disaster. Titan Quest actually got a new expansion recently (you go to Atlantis and kill everything there the ARPG genre does not particularly lend itself to nuanced storytelling), but Grim Dawn is an evolution of all of the principles of Titan Quest, in ways that almost a decade later read as quite a bit more provocative than they did back when Titan Quest was kind of a Diablo clone with only public domain IP to anchor it. Grim Dawn comes from a lineage - Crate Entertainment, the developer, is composed of most of the people who used to be Iron Lore Entertainment, the team that made Titan Quest and its many expansions. Mainly it was time to change that because I tried to get into another ARPG which will remain unnamed until I review it, it fixes itself, or it dies I think it’s better to let that product get to it and talk about something I really love, which I’ve put some 620 hours of time into: Grim Dawn.
We’ve reviewed ARPGs before in this space - please look here, then here, then very sternly here for previous escapades - but we’ve never actually liked one without reservation before now.
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