I’ve spent the better part of the weekend burning through Last Epoch, an action RPG that spent years in early access before hitting 1.0 on February 21.
In the ARPG community – those who spent their teenage years absorbed in Diablo 2 and masochists who spend thousands of hours navigating Path of Exile – Last Epoch isn’t some hidden gem; it’s been known about and celebrated for some time. But for those like me who dabble in the genre, playing through the campaign and maybe spending a couple dozen hours grinding the endgame, Last Epoch is one of the best surprises of 2024.
I’d describe Last Epoch as a satisfying middle ground between the accessibility of recent Diablo games and the overcomplexity of Path of Exile. I’ve said it before – you pretty much need a Ph.D. in the genre to navigate the skill trees of the latter, and the former has more production value than you could ever want but lacks a satisfying depth. Last Epoch isn’t perfect. It definitely slows its age, and some of its mechanics (like crafting) are overly complex and poorly explained, yet it sucked me in immediately with empowering skills and staggering character build possibilities.
Right from the first few hours, Last Epoch allows your avatar to melt mobs and stand up against powerful enemies; there are no early levels where you’re whacking away with simple skills until you get to the good stuff. It all comes immediately with a steady, dopamine-inducing stream of upgrades unlocking every dozen minutes. I played the Mage class first, and one of my first skills unlocked was Elemental Nova, which caused an explosion around me. Charging into the middle of a mob and spamming it, even after a dozen hours, was a power trip, and that was before I delved into masteries and specializing skills.
Each of the five classes in Last Epoch has three masteries to advance into. These masteries themselves are less like branches of a base class but instead complete classes on their own. The Primalist, for example, can advance into a Druid, Beastmaster, or Shaman. In other words, he can become a shapeshifter, a minion master, or a nature-magic wielder, all with skills that are quite different from one another. Even then, the passive trees of each mastery and some of the skills aren’t locked out of the others; you can still grab a couple Druid skills as a Shaman, for example, though you’re locked out of the more powerful ones. That said, a lot of available passives from each mastery tree work incredibly well with passives and skills from another.
Throw in skill specialization, which opens up advancement through sprawling skill trees for each selected. You can change a skill’s damage type or how they fundamentally work, as well as invest in damage multipliers and synergizing with other skills. As a result, each class has an wild amount of potential to explore that borders on overwhelming, yet never crosses that line – unlike in Path of Exile.
Related: How to Dismantle Items in Last Epoch
I picked the Mage class primarily because the Runemaster mastery is absolutely wild. You see, the Runemaster has the Runic Invocation skill, which allows it to cast a different spell based on the elemental type of the spells cast before it. Cast three fire spells and then Runic Invocation? Out comes Aergon’s Greater Fireball, which is basically a massive, mob-deleting explosion. A lightning skill followed up by a fire and then ice skill triggers Grand Prism Nova, while an ice skill followed by a fire and lightning skill sets off waves of Elemental Tide. There are 40 different combinations, and each of these spells scales with certain passives and receives bonuses from other skills.
Compared to how limited I felt as a Sorcerer in Diablo 4, Last Epoch makes me feel like I have agency to explore and build my spellcaster however I want. Every time I open up a skill specialization tree or consider where to spend my next passive point, there’s more for me to discover and consider. And never mind how gear comes with powerful affixes like “+57% fire damage from spells” that make me reconsider which route to go in constantly, and it’s no wonder I’m addicted.
The developer behind Last Epoch, Eleventh Hour Games, has clearly done a stellar job zeroing-in on what makes an ARPG difficult to put down: character build possibility, constant leveling up, and moment-to-moment dopamine from seeing mobs of monsters melt. And this is all without reaching the endgame of Last Epoch, which, by all accounts from longtime early access players, is pretty great. I don’t necessarily need to in order to get my money’s worth; already, I feel an incessant pull to try out other classes more than I did in Diablo 4 – even as I continue my Runemaster campaign.
And what makes Last Epoch even better? It costs only $40 in this era of bank-breaking releases.
Last Epoch is available on PC.
