GB Feature: Grim Dawn Review

We've just published our full, four-page review of Grim Dawn, the recently released offering to the popular action RPG genre from some of the original Titan Quest creators over at Crate Entertainment. Here's a little something to pique your interest:

Your secondary goal in Grim Dawn is to collect equipment. Characters can wear 14 items, including boots, gloves, helmets, weapons, shields, and rings. Each item you find can belong to one of five tiers: regular (white), magic (yellow), rare (green), epic or set (blue), or legendary (purple). Legendary items only drop once you've reached level 50 or so, but you can find all of the others right from the start -- assuming you're lucky enough. Nicely, Crate decided to make rare equipment reasonably plentiful and to not have an auction house, which means you have to hunt for your own gear -- often enough successfully -- rather than repeatedly gathering up enough money so you can buy something from someone else. That's always my preference in RPGs.

Interestingly, the items in Grim Dawn have more bonuses than you see in other games. Magic items can have five bonuses, rare items can have six bonuses, and epic items can have eight bonuses. The reason for this, I think, is that Grim Dawn includes a large number of different bonuses, and a lot of them won't help particular characters. For example, if you see a bonus that increases fire damage by 10%, and if you don't deal fire damage, then the bonus is a waste for you. So the trick is to find items that don't have any wasted bonuses, which is surprisingly tough (or at least it was for my character, who mostly only dealt physical damage).