What’s Good About Grim Dawn
Grim Dawn is a game that I have started over no less than five times since I’ve bought it (checks calendar) almost a year ago. And now I know you’re probably going “but Mo, why do a piece on Grim Dawn as opposed to Gears 5 which just came out (and is more relevant), or Devil May Cry 5 which you recently finished?” Because I felt like this would be a better use of my time; I also need to get through DMC5 on Son of Sparda and make progress on the Bloody Palace to feel like I’m not talking out of my ass, plus I need to finish Gears of War 4 before jumping onto 5 because I don’t want to be lost in the story. So you’re getting a Grim Dawn Post instead. With that little bit of housekeeping out of the way, let’s get down to it, shall we?
SO, GRIM DAWN. It’s a dark fantasy action RPG in the same vein as Diablo 2. It’s set in the world of Cairn, which is going through what can only be rightly called “the end of the world as we know it”. This is because of humanity being caught in a war between two otherworldly forces known as the Aetherials, a bunch of asshole ghosts who possess humans to wipe them out, and the Chthonians, a bunch of asshole (?) Lovecraftian Horrors that want to wipe out humans for the simple reasons of both existing and being used as cattle for the Aetherials, possibly under the belief of “this place sucks, it’d be cooler if it didn’t exist.’’
You play as a formerly Aetherial possessed human that protects survivors in the surrounding countryside of Devil’s Crossing, an abandoned prison, and hopefully, figure out what the heck is fully going on.
Now if you read all of this and are thinking of “wait, Path of Exile exists. I’ll missy play that because it’s free”, just hear me out. Because there are some things that I think Grim Dawn does better and this happened during my most recent attempt to get into it.
For the longest time, I was trying to get through the game through a mix of magic and ranged gun attacks. This created a style that felt more passive and kind of boring, but it led me to discover that I liked playing a Death Knight build (it’s even referred to as such in-game!) that’s essentially a combination of melee attacks and death magic. This is tied to the game’s mastery system. Grim Dawn doesn’t have character classes in the traditional sense. It instead uses a system called “Masteries” to give you choices of how you want to play your character. There are nine masteries in total and you pick two of them, the first at level two and the second and level 10. While this may feel limiting to your choices at first, but I’ve found that it’s a great way to ease the player into the skill system and let them get comfortable with the gameplay/formulate ideas for builds.
This is also fostered and encouraged through the augmentations that skills can get that have the ability to radically change the way the skill works, and subsequently, your playstyle as well. The best example early on for me was when I picked up a skill augmentation for my Forcewave ability (A shockwave type attack from the Soldier mastery tree) that changed it from a super-strong shockwave attack on a cooldown timer to a much more spammable ability that trades out direct damage for more area of effect damage. And this is not even taking the devotion trees into account, which are essentially the skill grid from Path of Exile but nowhere near as intimidating and also constellation-based.
But on a more serious note, I do like the system that is in place compared to Path of Exile. This is largely because it comes down to being able to enjoy the game on a casual level and not feel like I’m living in fear of fucking something up with my build. The game is slower-paced in comparison to other ARPG’s certainly helps in this regard. What I mean by that is that in games like Diablo 3 and the more recent seasons of Path of Exile, you can kill enemies so quickly that their damage doesn’t even matter because they are dead by the time they can reach you. In the case of Grim Dawn, the action is substantially slower in comparison to the examples that I mentioned and this makes it so that you have to play more tactically in the lower levels (in my case, that means summoning skeletons as bodyguards and then smashing dudes in the face while the mooks are distracted).
Overall, based on the first 13 or so hours I’ve logged so far, I like Grim Dawn. On top of the things that I’ve listed for the piece above, it also works on the level of the “talking with others” game genre that I enjoy as a thing to help keep my hands busy as a means to keep a stimulating conversation going. It’s also good for helping when you want to burn off some excess brain energy and stay up until 2 in the morning playing a Diablo-like game and Diablo 3 isn’t scratching that particular itch. If you see it on sale, give it a shot, you might find a new favorite. Or you may not. I dunno, I don’t know your tastes.
Images from https://getpresskit.com/t/24/presskit/ and https://www.igdb.com/games/grim-dawn/presskit
