My Review of POE 2.

Disclaimer: Please understand that this is solely my own opinion based on my time playing the game.


Things I Love About POE 2.

1. The Story - It's well written and avoids most of the hero tropes. There are some truly terrible people in the game world but for the most part it's just people wanting to survive and have some agency over their own existence.

2. The Graphics - It's a beautiful game and the world is well themed and designed.

3. The Classes - The playable characters are individually unique and have their own motivations and unique perspectives on the world.



Things I don't like About POE 2.

1. Risk vs Reward - Games with a Darksoul level difficulty usually have guaranteed rewards for difficult encounters. Spending 30+ minutes learning a boss only to get a rare item and some minor currencies doesn’t feel good. Especially considering the item that drops is usually not for your build.

2. Failure Penalties - This ties heavily into risk vs reward. The level of the penalties for failure should correspond with the level of rewards for succeeding.

3. Meaningful Choices - Choices in the game don’t feel meaningful. Most uniques, ascendancies, and notables on the passive tree don’t feel impactful.

4. Opportunity Costs - Not every positive needs to have a negative trade-off. This is especially true with unique items, support gems, and notable passives. There should only be trade offs if the gains would otherwise be overpowered.

5. Power Fantasy - In a lot of cases when I get a new piece of gear or level up, my character doesn’t feel stronger and in some cases even feels weaker due to scaling.

6. Respecting the players time - The game feels like it doesn’t respect the players time. The map design with all of its dead ends and the explode on death mobs and environmental hazards mostly seem to be there to waste the players time.

7. Lack of Chill - The game keeps the difficulty up constantly. The game requires constant focus to not fail or lose progress. This design doesn’t work. Even games like Darksouls have slow and fast periods to allow the player to recover their focus and get prepared for the next fight.

8. Check Box Requirements - I am not saying that there should be no defenses or resists but since they are mandatory, it's more of a chore to fit them into the build than an actual player choice.

9. Loot Pool - A lot of the affixes and prefixes on gear seem to be there just to water down the loot pool and makes most items feel worse. This plays strongly into the risk vs rewards gameplay and power fantasy. I am not saying all gear should be amazing but on the other hand 99% of gear shouldn’t be bad either.

10. Crafting - 99% of crafting is just a longer way to make a bad piece of gear just like any of the normal drops. There is very little player agency when it comes to making your gear better and almost all currency crafting is a form of weighted gambling that doesn’t favor the player in any way.

11. Controls and Combos - Not every build should be required to be played like I am playing Rachmaninoff on the piano. The game should still be reasonably playable by people with RSI and other age related ailments.

Yup sums it up

To put it into simpler words and summarise all of what you wrote .
The devs did drop a new league and make the game even worse than early access .

Agree on everything.

Said all this in December. Respect the players, focus on enjoyment first.

Half the mechanics ported over from PoE 1 were specifically mechanics that like, less than 5% of the people that played regularly, actually enjoyed. If their goal was a wider audience, they needed to scrap them, or rework them.

Economy/crafting/trading and poor loot were all exposed by PoE 2. Only reason it was excused in PoE 1 was because you could run 20 maps an hour, and overcome this all with sheer numbers and grind.

Your average gamer, looking for a decent challenge, and a game that respects their time. Isn't going to enjoy most of the things you mentioned in your post. They took what a few streamers and whales/addicts liked about the game and tried to shove it into PoE 2. Now all the cracks are showing.