

Much of the time you’ll find yourself being given the option to help or hurt those you encounter, allowing you to be the friendly adventurer or all-around jerk. While much of what you encounter is purely optional, there are a few times when the core story will force you to align with a particular side before progressing. This system never cheapened the game experience since you did have to naturally find rifts in the wild before being able to travel to that location, so this only helped to alleviate backtracking in an already gigantic adventure.Ĭhoices have consequences, and who you choose to align with will directly affect missions, areas you can explore, and items available to you, allowing for a great deal of replayability. I would explore and loot until my inventory was full, open a rift to town and sell my unnecessary items, then hop right back into the fray and continue my journey. While I spent most of my time on foot rather than fast traveling, as I wanted to make sure I left no stone unturned, these rifts remove the frustration that may have stemmed from the constant back and forth between merchants and areas while exploring. Additionally, you are given the ability to create your own rift to quickly leave an area to sell loot or just to prevent backtracking through a particularly large area once you’ve cleared it. Travel is simple and handled via rifts which you unlock each time you reach a new area and activate. I enjoyed constantly checking my progress via the overmap to spot any areas I may have missed – whether due to not having the necessary items to progress or due to encountering enemies too strong for my current build – and then complete those areas once I was better prepared. While I do enjoy randomly generated maps, the static world in Grim Dawn was the right choice. Unlike Diablo III and its randomly generated map, the map in Grim Dawn is static and does not change between playthroughs, allowing the developers to fully flesh out the world they created. There is so much to see, do, and find that I was constantly telling myself I’d stop my gaming session after one more cave only to find five other points of interest. Like previously mentioned, the open world is huge – really, huge barely does it justice. I had a ton of fun unlocking new skills and figuring out which abilities best suited my playstyle when up against the endless horde of monstrosities I faced at every turn. Skills can then be quick-assigned to any controller button for instant access. Points gained from level ups can be used to either increase a skill or invest in the mastery tree to unlock new skills.

Soldier, Nightblade, Occultist, Shaman, Inquisitor, Demolitionist, Arcanist, Oathkeeper, and Necromancer are all available as starting classes, which you can then further customize via mastery skill trees which unlock as you progress. Years of updates and DLC have allowed Grim Dawn to expand into a game in which nearly every player will find a class/mastery that will suit their playstyle easily.

While the overarching story never fully grabbed my attention, it certainly set up a world in which I gladly spent well over 50 hours inhabiting with many more still to go. Its world and inhabitants are incredibly fleshed out, featuring diverse terrains, tons of NPCs with distinct personalities to help, fight, or learn from, and a wide variety of enemies to take down. Grim Dawn: Definitive Edition is impressive. I’m a huge fan of the ARPG genre, with Diablo III, Victor Vran, Nine Parchments, Baulder’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and more comprising more hours of playtime than I’d like to admit, yet I had never played Grim Dawn until the release of the definitive edition on the Xbox One - and now I am kicking myself for waiting so long to check it out. So how does Grim Dawn hold up now, nearly five years after its official release and almost 8 years since it’s alpha days? In a word: fantastic.
#Interactive complete grim dawn map Pc
First released in an alpha state in 2013, the game officially launched on PC in 2016 to rave reviews from both critics and players alike due to its blend of ARPG elements and enormous open world which provided players with hundreds of hours of finely tuned gameplay. Grim Dawn has come a long way since its humble Kickstarter origins.
