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Stay away from this game!
399 View2025-04-27
Read my review if you are a player who doesn't mind paying a few bucks for games. Most of the reviews I've seen are only about the early phase of the game. But the real problem is its shitty endgame. So please listen to me and stay away from this game at all cost. I played Torchlight: Infinite for 100+ hours, and I invested 6000USD into this game to get all the currently available pets to pull, and max ranked all the OP pets. I'm very deeply disappointed about this game. I'm convinced that no player should ever get into this game, unless you enjoy endless suffering (Especially if you have a few bucks around and wants to pay for a better experience. You will only get worse experience.) If you are the type of player who loves suffering (i.e. needless challenge), you already have POE 1&2, so you really don't need to play a worse version of POE.
Initially, I was deceived by all the negative comments. They claim that pets will give you unfair advantage, they will make you strong and get more loot. All of that is not true unless you also do heavy real money trading (a few hundreds of USD per season for starters). If you don't like real money trade? This game is not for you.
The good part of this game is some of the streamlined UI, like you can salvage directly in your bag, and the loot filter is easier to get around. The art style is quite likeable to me, they don't paint a dark atmosphere like all the other ARPGs do -- I still don't get why people are obsessed with ARPGs with a pitch black map and have all the skill effects flash bang your eyes. This game has some waifu characters that look nice, but most of the 3D models are really limited in mesh so they look super cheap, like a low-tier mobile game 5 years ago.
The okay part is that they have a relatively short campaign. We are not here to get stuck in campaign, so I like that. They have a working auction house, which is somewhat convenient to use. The only downside is you cannot look up the price for a skill from the skill UI, and you cannot easily check the price of things you don't already own (more clicks to check).
The bad part is the enemy design! The core idea is that you as the player has to suffer, and learn how to reduce that suffering. Not only you need to 10x your DPS for every next difficulty level, you also need to find numerous ways to increase your defense for every difficulty. Even simply 10x your toughness is not enough, you have to find immunity everywhere, and gradually max out every single defense mechanism: shield, shield back, damage block, skill block, elemental resistance cap, curse reduction and immunity, damage reduction, damage type redirection, etc. If you are weak in one area, then you will just randomly die. It is not a skill issue, there will be tons of stuff on the screen to make sure you can't see which effect has high damage. Even if you want to dodge, the enemy skill follows you! Yes, the 3D model of that skill effect follows YOU, not rule of physics. If you dash, the enemy skill will dash the same distance as you do. The designer wants to make sure the skill will release accurately against you, and easily deals damage that is easily much more than your total health. You have to invest heavily into certain mitigation affixes on your gear and pet board, and they are all super rare.
To put it in perspective, you progression looks like this:
- Difficulty T7: you can comfortably clear T7 at less than 500 flames cost (flame is the in game currency). You can achieve this with what you obtained naturally up to this point. You can farm here for ~50 flames per hour.
- Difficulty T8: you can clear at roughly 5000-10000 flames cost. You can farm here for 200-300 flames per hour.
- Difficulty PT8: you can enter at roughly 20000-30000 flames cost. You can farm here for 400-500 flames per hour if you are efficient.
- Deep Space: you can enter at roughly 80000-100000 flames cost. I'm not sure how much you can farm there because I can't.
The huge gear cost gaps means you have to grind for weeks to progress, so you don't die randomly all the time in the next difficulty. Most of the flames are used to set up the defense mechanisms while preserving your DPS. Those defensive mechanisms are not something you can just choose in your talent tree. You must purchase them from auction house in a really high price because everyone needs them despite those things are super rare drops. If you can't progress to deep space (which most players won't), you are not going to be able to even obtain all the seasonal rewards. Every difficulty jump introduces a few new ways for you to die instantly, and you must build defense layers against them, there is not shortcut. However, there are players who can get to the max difficulty on day 3 of a new season. Be a genius and guess how they got there! The official dev team said they are against real money trade, but they have all the leaderboards to see the data and they are not doing anything about gear cost. In their own words (SS8 teaser livestream), they said even after all the previous feedback, they still want players to "experience the feeling of achievement when solving the survivability problem", and yet they claimed that "most player are playing glass cannon builds because tanky builds don't have a lot of use cases", to make it funnier, they said the new hero and many heroes are not defense focused and they don't have plans to make defensive heroes. It's like they know there is a problem that makes players suffer, and they want players to just deal with it (basically RMT or suffer).
I loved almost everything about this game, the defensive gear building is what makes me feel like an absolute moron investing 6000 USD into this game. There are only 3 ways you can take as a player: (1) don't play this game, (2) suffer in this game for thousands of hours per season to earn the right to stop suffering (3) do real money trading with hundreds of USD per season to play it like a decent game.
For me, I will choose the first path and stop playing this shitty game. I sincerely advise you to do the same.
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