Feedback after 1st Act 3 Finish (PS5).

Here are my thoughts after completing Act 3 for the first time last night. For context I'm playing a Deadeye Ranger on PS5 and my skills are ice shot and poison burst.

Graphics: A-
Art style is appealing and HUGE upgrade over POE 1. More colorful than Diablo 4. Good animations, Excellent spell effects. Only negative, not really unique. The art style is generic but well polished generic. Overall great.

UI: B-
The UI mostly tells you everything you need to know. It's not cluttered. I appreciate the options to change it, like map transparency. However, I still had to go outside the game to understand quite a bit. Most of the status icons aren't explained. Some effects don't even have status icons. For example, the plague damage from bursting plague. I couldn't tell if that gem was doing anything. Several enemy effects put status icon on me that I have no clue about. I imagine this is less a problem on PC, but on console it's pretty annoying. Also some skills don't work as expected. Like does Poison burst crit? I don't think it does but I'm not sure. Overall UI is fine but there is certainly room for improvement. Also no loot filter on console.

Controls B-
The twin stick targeting was a great idea. I appreciate the option to adjust how long it takes to switch targets. While the controls are functional for most things, some skills just don't work well. For example, fire wall almost never lands where I want it to. Lightning Rod and Toxic Growth both are clunky to cast. This friction pushed me away from using certain skills. Overall controls are fine.


Content (So Far): D
Content covers a lot so let's break it down.

== Boss Fights A+
The boss fights are just great. Good mechanics. Good voice acting. Good pacing. Only two negatives: The chimera during the trials of chaos is annoying. I don't like that it basically disappears and becomes hard to find. The arena for this fight is clunky. The second negative was Mektul. I like the fight but some how it bugged out and stopped attacking and just walked forward. On the bright side this made killing him trivial. I won't hold that against the game since this is EA. Overall bosses have been the BEST content so far.

== Items: C
Generic Action RPG items. Nothing about the items I encountered excited me. There not as bad as D3 on launch but they aren't as good as D2.

== Quest & Quest Rewards: C


== Skills: C+
Admittedly I've only looked at bow skills but what I've looked at didn't really impress me. The marks skill basically do nothing. Sniper's Mark doesn't trigger very often And it only works with Barrage (so far). Barrage isn't really impactful and the cooldown is too long. Voltaic Mark didn't seem impactful at all. Why do the mark skill only target one MOB? So they are boss only skills? That feels lame to me.

Gas Arrow is cool but you need firewall to use it (and aiming FW on PS5 is clunky). Electrocuting Arrow performs badly. It's like you're floating very slowly then when you land, you pause for a moment. I was expecting it to be more fluid. All the charging skills force you to stand still in a game where you need to move constantly. Escape shot is too slow and usually doesn't land where I want it too. I feel a lot of these skill suffer because of console controls. The skills look very cool, they sound very cool, the animations are very cool, they just don't perform well.

I was also disappointed that there were no dex based meta gems. I don't get cast on crit? or cast on poison? I guess I'm suppose to spec into INT to do any cast of freeze shenanigans? Overall the skills are fine but could use some work.

Map Size D+
Too big. Too long. But mainly the problem with the map size is:

Normal Mobs: F
This is my biggest problem with the game. I don't enjoy the combination of swarms of enemies AND large health pools. It just makes combat a slog and tedious. I was able to tolerate it up to Act 3 but as that act progressed I just became more annoyed. Eventually I started just running past everything. But if I"m running past content I'm bored. If I become bored with a game. I stop playing.


Final Verdict: C+
As it is I'm not sure if I'll keep playing. I don't really want to go thru the campaign again on cruel difficulty. Monk looks cools, so I'll probably try that for a little bit. From what I've read about Endgame it doesn't seem like I'm missing out on much either. This game has potential though, so I'll will check back again later. For EA it was worth the 30 bucks.