There are games that are extremely popular that I just don’t get. Grim Dawn has a loyal fanbase and a Very Positive rating on Steam. Yet after three hours, I still can’t understand the appeal. Am I out of touch, or is it the children who are wrong?
Grim Dawn is a Diablo-esque hack and slash game. Gameplay consists of accepting quests, killing lots of monsters, then collecting your reward.
Story and Worldbuilding
The overall story is well written and is probably the most interesting part of the game. The story is complemented by the design of the game’s world, which looks gorgeous and helps to provide lore to the player. You will learn which areas are infested with undead, where the roads have been blocked by raids on caravans, and other things you can infer purely from the environment.
Moving around the world is done without loading screens for the most part. You can use Rifts to teleport around the world, but you need to unlock each area’s Riftstone before you do. The only time I saw loading screens where the times I would go into caves to explore – these often lead to special areas where you will fight a boss at the end.
As you explore you will find survivors, some who want to get back to civilisation, others who will lead you into new quests, and some who just want to offer you trades. You will also uncover many notes, books, and tomes that will give you background on recent events in each area. The lore in this game is extremely detailed and well presented.
Combat and Progression
However, for all its storytelling strengths, Grim Dawn’s combat loop quickly became monotonous. The basic controls are to hold down the left mouse button to move. If you want to kill an enemy, hold down the left mouse button on it and you will attack it. You can also use skills by assigning them to some hotkeys and pressing them while fighting enemies.
What this means is that you play the entire game holding down the mouse button, and occasionally pressing a hot key if your health is dropping too fast. If your health gets too low, run away for a few seconds and wait for it to regenerate, something that happens pretty quickly. Repeat ad infinitum. To me, it ends up feeling barely more interactive than an idle game.
I noticed this especially after defeating enemies like I normally do, and didn’t realise until much later that I had actually defeated a major boss. They had more powerful attacks, but the strategy of “hold the mouse button down” was just as effective as it was against normal enemies, that the only thing I noticed was that it took slightly longer.
You progress by killing enemies, earning experience, and levelling up your character. As you level up you can increase your basic statistics. Higher stats allow you to use more powerful equipment. Alongside this is a skill tree that gives you extra abilities and bonuses. You earn skill points as you level up and complete quests, giving another avenue for progression.
The skill tree provides both passive and hotkey abilities. You will learn what they do fairly quickly, but they all essentially boil down to “push this key to make fight easier”. There might be more depth to it later in the game, but as I’ll talk about below, this introduction to it left me unmotivated to explore the progression tree any further.
But this progression doesn’t change the fact that all you end up doing is holding down the left mouse button and hitting a few hotkeys until enemy dead. Advancement just leads to the same uninteresting loop that offers nothing new to the player. If there is more to this game’s progression I’m unmotivated to explore it after spending a few hours basically doing the same thing over and over.
It’s a gameplay loop that is repetitive, unchallenging, and boring. I played the game for over two hours, slayed several bosses, and not once did I feel like I was challenged or forced to make any tactical choices other than occasionally running away to regenerate my health, or press a hotkey or two. The bosses have more powerful attacks, but nothing that adds much challenge to the already easy gameplay. The only time I died during my short time playing this game was when I got complacent and forgot to run away and regenerate my health.
This may appeal to gamers who want to live out the power fantasy over strategic gameplay – and given the huge fanbase of this game this is probably the case. It’s a game where you can casually level up and progress, while taking in the environment and discovering the game’s lore.
Loot
Unfortunately, Grim Dawn’s loot system suffers from similar issues as its combat. Items have unimaginative generated names like Puncturing Scrapmetal Maul of Blood or Aggressive Patchwork Leggings of Protection. You end up just looking at the stats and picking the most powerful item, ignoring any attempt at giving the items identity.
Compare this to a game like Baldur’s Gate where every item you gain has been been carefully designed and are useful to most adventuring parties. Each one has its own history, unique abilities, a specific appearance, and can be utilised in different ways. Even if your party doesn’t need them, they still add flavour and lore to the world.
There are a few quests where Grim Dawn provides well designed loot like this, but either it won’t be powerful compared to equipment you already have, or you will find something better 5 minutes later. Shops tend to have either unusable items, the items you can use being weaker than the items you already have. The same can be said for many quest rewards, which I would often just drop right away. It leads to a feeling of huge amounts of automatically generated content, most of which will never be interesting to the player.
Final Thoughts
Grim Dawn could really benefit from some more interesting combat, and more focused item design. As it stands there is technically a lot of variety, but that variety ends up feeling bland and uninteresting. Instead of finding the one and only Berserker Sword, you will constantly find useless equipment then come across an item that increases your armour by a few points so equip that instead. You likely won’t remember what the item is called 30 seconds later.
Of course, I may have missed a beat, and it’s possible this game gets more fun as it progresses. But if it takes a game several hours before it gets fun, then it’s a bad game. And after spending 3 hours bored out of my skull, I’m disinclined to keep playing this game. If you have more patience and enjoy mindlessly slashing at multitudes of enemies, then this might be a game for you. Some people will enjoy the grind and loot cycle, despite it’s lack of challenge.
While Grim Dawn has a rich story and world-building that some players will love, its repetitive combat and loot system left me unfulfilled. If you’re looking for a deeply tactical action RPG, you may find more challenge elsewhere.
