EARLY ACCESS REVIEW
This review is for those with experience playing Path of Exile 2; new players are encouraged to play the game to develop their own opinions.

To be clear, Path of Exile 2 has the potential to evolve into something great… the greatest ARPG ever in fact. Even small design shifts like the introduction of a dodge roll have added substantial tactical depth to the gameplay. But despite these improvements, the game’s publicly stated design philosophy is increasingly at odds with the actual gameplay experience.

GGG has repeatedly insisted that PoE2 is meant to be slower and more deliberate. That’s a fine vision; but in reality, endgame mapping and enemy speed blatantly contradict this claim. The pace remains just as frenetic as it was in PoE1 and there’s just as much onscreen effects which can make it exceedingly challenging at times to even know what’s going on. If the intent was to slow things down, then loot distribution should have been adjusted to match. It hasn't been. On the contrary, this current iteration has made currency even more scarce, doubling down on grind without commensurate reward. The trade system? Still a disaster, faithfully carried over from PoE1 with all its archaic inefficiencies.

GGG seems unwilling to internalize a lesson that should be fundamental by now: punishing gameplay is not the same as challenging gameplay. Many systems are saturated with negative modifiers that drain momentum and morale rather than inspire mastery. Nowhere is this more obvious than in end game mapping, where stacking mods can paradoxically make a map less playable due to sheer mechanical overkill. Several mods outright mean that if you luck into the wrong map suffix you will automatically be throwing that map in the trash (I’m looking at you temporal chains).

Yes, the game is in early access, but GGG seems to have misunderstood what early access is for. It’s supposed to be a testing ground, a sandbox for players to explore systems, theorycraft, and search for broken interactions. In a game that’s loot dependent, that requires access to resources. Instead, loot is miserly. I constantly run over 100% magic find and still see abysmal returns. Divines are rare. Exalts bizarrely drop more often than Chaos, Regals, or Alchemy orbs. Orbs of Annulment or Chance? Nearly mythical (I say this after playing for over 420+ hours).

Crafting is nonexistent in any meaningful form as the entire system has been reduced to pure gambling. The tools are there and were shown to work in PoE1, but in PoE2 there’s no actual semi-deterministic crafting so experimentation dies on the vine.

Defense stats in PoE2 remain deeply imbalanced. Armor is still underwhelming, scaling poorly in the face of high incoming damage. Evasion is serviceable. Meanwhile, energy shield continues to dominate across most content. This persistent asymmetry undermines build diversity and reinforces a stagnant meta. This is further exacerbated by the aforementioned lack of currency and crafting, which often leaves players stuck if they’re not wealthy enough to regear their characters in a different manner.

The Trial of the Sekhema is one of the more baffling screwups in the game. The central mechanic, an “honor” meter that diminishes when you’re hit, actively punishes entire archetypes of play. Builds that rely on taking damage as part of their identity such as anything melee related, thorns-based, armor-heavy, or self-damage synergies, are effectively penalized for functioning as intended. The concept of "honor" in combat might make sense thematically, but from a gameplay perspective it's incoherent. “Oh but honor isn’t an issue if you stack honor resist”, ok, stacking “honor resist” is a lazy workaround, not a solution. “Well you can do the Trials of Chaos then”, sure, let’s talk about the ToC.

The Trials of Chaos continue the trend of stacking punishment under the guise of difficulty. Layer upon layer of negative modifiers are applied to both the player and the environment, creating scenarios where success often feels less like a result of skill and more like surviving Jonathan’s spite. Once again, the issue isn’t that the trials are difficult, it’s that GGG confuses misery with difficulty. These trials don't challenge a player's decision-making or adaptability so much as test their tolerance for suffering. Some of the modifiers will 100% of the time be a death sentence, which is ridiculous for a game mode that demands you run a gauntlet.
To reiterate: punishing gameplay is not the same as challenging gameplay. And until GGG takes that distinction seriously, much of the game's potential will remain unrealized beneath the weight of its own contradictions.

And then there’s the death penalty: a flat 10% XP loss. It’s an outdated design relic that punishes players disproportionately, especially in a game this unstable. The optimization is rough; CPU usage spikes inexplicably, screens freeze, and enemies with invisible on-death effects can wipe you before you even register the threat. The game already limits player through currency scarcity and map restrictions, why stack another misery mechanic on top of it all? Literally nearly every one of my high level deaths has been due to the game freaking out and freezing for a split second at the most inopportune times. This is the mechanic that makes me rage quit. This is the mechanic that makes me put the game down and leave it for extended periods of time. This is the mechanic which makes me rethink spending money on stash tabs, cosmetics, mystery boxes, etc.

Let me be absolutely clear here: the XP penalty is not just frustrating, it’s demoralizing. It actively discourages continued play and reveal a fundamental disrespect for player time. Once you hit the late 80s or early 90s in level, even fully juiced maps roll several levels below your character level, making XP grinding a slog. Combine that with PC performance issues and what you’re left with is a bad experience. And yes, I can already hear the diehard fanbase trotting out the same tired defense: “There have to be consequences, otherwise people will just spam content and they won’t learn how to get good.” Sorry, but no. That argument falls apart under the most basic scrutiny. Players can’t spam the same content; maps are gated behind RNG & limited runs. The system itself is already self-limiting. You don’t need an additional punitive XP penalty to “preserve challenge”; you need a well-balanced game that respects player time and rewards effort instead of eroding it in a hot instant.

Things I would like to see:
• Campaign Skip After Completion
Once a player has completed the campaign, they should be allowed to skip it on subsequent characters.
• Make the Remaining Campaign Choices Reversible
In both Act 3’s, characters are forced to make two decisions regarding stats that are currently permanent. This design is incoherent, especially given that ascendancy choices can now be changed freely. Please allow these decisions to be changed as well (Let Doryani be the interface to make the changes).
• League Character Imports
The requirement to re-run the campaign for each new league or character is, again, tedious. A solution could involve importing characters back into a new league; either starting fresh at level 1 or with a baseline (e.g., level 60 with 500k gold and access to early maps).
• PoE1 Atlas Skill Tree
The Atlas passive tree in PoE1 was amazing. The current iteration in PoE2 is by comparison a poor imitation. Bring back that depth!
• Boots: movespeed is necessary, so make it an implicit
• An Actual Early Access Philosophy: Treat the current state as a live experiment, not a soft launch. Be generous with currency, unique’s, and loot bases (hell let Ketzuli have another few tabs that just sell white bases), focus on testing systems rather than preserving some arbitrary economy that can easily be reset or wiped.

It's made by one dude who drops the funniest patch notes I've ever read. He has a really bad mic that he uses for the patch videos where he breaks down design decisions and what he's been focusing on for the update. He's got a kid who interrupted one of the videos and something about that made me realize just how much passion is in this game.

Absolutely worth your money and time. It even has a free demo, who does that nowadays?

Post-Brexit London has never been rendered in such loving detail, the knife crime is incredibly accurate and the locals look spot on, 10 Tea and biscuits outta 10!

I think I speak for everyone reading this when I say that the setting and worldbuilding is the most significant aspect of a fantasy game. Vanilla Skyrim is no longer Skyrim with the addition of guns, and LOTR loses all meaning with the implementation of cars. That’s why some things, which may work well for some games, won’t necessarily function well for all.

And that’s my main gripe with Wartales, it’s that the developers have seen fit to add an ingredient which doesn’t mesh well with the European medieval setting that the game is inspired by, and as a result mine, and many others’ immersion has been irrevocably ruined.

Simply put, my problem is women.

The inability to accurately depict women in a medieval setting blights this game. By allowing women, and charcoal hued, sallow monsters to become warriors, you spurn the tenets and principles of medieval fantasy. Knights, paladins, swordsmen and archers, there is nothing that these infernal harridans of carnal sin have not defiled. The dainty palmed hagravens of the gentler sex have been permitted to infiltrate the ranks of warriorhood and cast a mockery upon what it means to fight on the frontline, and as such they must be removed.

And don’t, for one moment, think that my problem is due to sexism. I love women being features in gaming, but only when they are accurately depicted. In fact, one of my favourite games, Red Dead Redemption, allows you to brutally murder women, and hogtie prostitutes under lamps, where you can then set them on fire, until the waning remnants of their screams is extinguished by the final bout of brutality you inflict. In that game women behave how they’re meant too. At the mere prospect of violence, or when they witness another being battered, they flee and shriek in the distance, or in more pleasant circumstances, emit high pitched, blood curling wails, when you violently have your way with them. Now, some may argue that what I have described is promoting inaccuracy, as not all women flee from adversary, with some women attempting to physically defend themselves, and I would concur with your assessment. That’s why I’m wholly in support of games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, which acknowledge that some women may strike back. In this game, when a woman attempts to strike you, all it takes is one or two haymakers until she is sprawled out, and lay’s strewn upon the ground, where you can then trample the wench until she rues the folly of her struggle.

Yet Wartales has none of this. Not a single women I’ve encountered was a hapless damsel in distress, ripe for plunder and barbarity.

I may even be able to forgive the developers if they were to add a feature, where you could abduct a female masquerading as a warrior, and torture her in a medieval Skyrim esque Dark Brotherhood torture chamber, pressing hot irons to her flesh and beating her repeatedly until your amusement tires, and forcing her to repent for committing heresy against natural law and the very principles of normalcy, but the developers have shied away from all such approaches. They don’t even acknowledge the absurdity of women playing dress up and strutting around like mother hen’s on the field of war. It’s an insult to even have it where a woman poses a discernible threat to my party, for I know that if I was in that world, I could wrestle any female fighter to the ground and throttle her until she goes limp and ragged afore my iron grip. Furthermore, it should be mentioned that while you are permitted to show bias, and butcher women, these acts of wanton aggression are never due to the women being aligned with the gentler sex, and are always the result of contrived reasons, simply for the sake of sadism, or malice. Let it be known that there is nothing malicious about humbling those who seek to defy normalcy.

Anyway, I think I can safely say that everyone would feel more content if Wartales just stuck to the pre established principles and allowed us to batter women without encountering even the briefest semblance of difficulty. Think Kratos brutally murdering Hera in God Of War, tearing the limbs of maidens in Postal 2, repeatedly smashing a woman into the ground until she morphs into vermillion paste in People’s Playground, or modding Kingdom Come Deliverance, to turn Runt into a woman, and then masturbating while Henry repeatedly pummels him, until nowt but red pulp remains. This is what everyone wants, and this is what Wartales needs to add if they hope to be in the good graces of their players. You know what you need to do now, in order to fix your game Shiro Games, so you better be writing up your patch notes and altering your women in this game post haste.

I am stacking bodies in the camp outside of the starting town.

Nobody suspects a thing yet.

I kill them one by one either on the road or sleeping in their beds.

Then I drag them to the camp to stack.

I think there's other stuff you can do like questing and playing dice, but I'm just going to keep stacking bodies until the whole town is dead.

Then I'll move onto the next one.

Buy game
Make friends buy game
Observe how ludicrous friends are
Ooin the ludicrosity
Eldritch horrors approach
Espy friends die
Chortle at friends
Game good

If you've previously played the Rematch Beta Test, I'm highly recommending deleting the Runtime folder in YourUser\AppData\Local.
This fixes certain crashes, errors at start of queues, settings-related issues and loss of controls on your Character.

The game is good. I'm not commenting on the PvP because I have little first-hand experience, but the PvE journey of 80h had been fantastic. Especially not having played Conan Exiles before. I'm not going to go into detail here, this is a great multiplayer survival platform and I suggest you read other reviews if you want to know if the mechanics, world and gameplay loop are for you.

What is not good is Funcom's take on the Live Service business model and it's already showing. After Friday's server issues, Rhea - Legg lost most bases. In our corner of the map, every base for miles around was destroyed. Only frameworks left. Of 10 bases, just one even had a claim left at the end of it. Chests gone, vehicles gone, everything except character progress gone.

So basically my group of 4 had lost ~300h of collective progress. When asking (not demanding, not being a **** about it) on Discord if there would be rollbacks, I was laughed out of the room by a community mod. As expected, players droolingly brought out the "you're just a soft casual" lines.
Since the days of Ultima Online and later EvE and countless hardcore mode installations, I have lost more progress in games than others have played, that's not even a flex. I have no issue with ingame consequences and feel like these are generally lacking today.

But here's the deal: In each of these prior instances I KNEW what I was getting into. The games clearly communicated the danger of losing everything. Losing everything to server issues after having paid extra cash for early access (like a chump) in designated safe PvE zones that were never intended to be destroyed like this, that's something different. Devs not commenting on rollbacks or even acknowledging the massive base destruction on several Sietches, that's something else. Then jokingly passing the blame to players, trying to veil your ♥♥♥♥♥♥ server-destroying patch in roleplay with "hurr durr, it was Shai Hulud", that's just rude. Not to mention that all tickets created via the ingame help function have so far been completely ignored without even an answer for anyone I know from my Sietch that submitted one.

This game does not respect your time and frankly doesn't give a damn. If you're fine with what I've described above, by all means, buy this game and you'll thoroughly enjoy it. But I can't.

Disclaimer: My 80 hours were played outside of Steam, hence the low playtime count here.

Classic Paradox Interactive: release a half decent game concept as a full fledged game, then rake in the money from DLCs which actually complete the original game concept. Don't buy the game unless you plan on investing in the DLC, also. Playing the vanilla game felt tedious and pointless. With Green Planet, at least, there is a purpose - working toward terraforming Mars. That makes it a bit more enjoyable, but you're probably better off waiting a decade or two until they're done releasing content for this game so you can buy it all in a cheap Steam sale pack.

House Flipper 2 is quickly becoming one of my favourite fantasy RPGs. In this series, you play a young "home owner" which is kind of like a mage or wizard except your special power is that you can afford to buy a house (A house is kind of like an apartment but you have space between you and your neighbours, think like a whole building devoted to just your apartment.). Once you buy the house, your quests are to make it liveable and clean. Frequently this involves things such as picking up trash, paintings, and placing furniture throughout your abode. If you succeed, you can then sell the house and buy another house, increasing your powers through the ritual of "Selling" or "Flipping", which permit you to perform cleaning or painting endeavours faster. When you perform a selling, you sell your House to a new Home Owner and buy a new, bigger home to better demonstrate your majestic prowess. Furthermore, the furniture placement, styling, alignment, and controls feel like a huge improvement over the previous iteration.

The game has a few rough edges. Performance needs polish, but I found that disabling dynamic resolution(set it to None) helped immensely and let me keep it at a steady 60 FPS on High Settings with a 1080Ti. Some of the tool-specific controls could use some tweaking - trash bag tossing follows its own novel physics unseen until now, and the window cleaning can get jittery with high DPI mouses, but those more like occasional annoyances rather than show-stoppers. Overall I would recommend it, it's a fantastic "chilling and listening to an audiobook" style game and can be picked up and set down very quickly, making it great for when you just want to play for 10-20 minutes before going to clean your own kitchen, which you've ignored to clean a virtual kitchen..