Path of Exile 2 Review: 105 Hours With the Best ARPG Around Right Now

I’ll say it right away. Path of Exile 2 is the best ARPG you can play right now, and it isn’t close.

Nothing else on the market gives you this much customization, this much exploration, or gameplay that stays this fun for this long. I went in expecting to like it. I came out having sunk 105 hours into it before I finally set it down.

Here’s the catch. The game is still in Early Access, and I almost never touch Early Access games.

I like to wait until a game is finished. But this one is basically there already, and if you play through a full season there is a mountain of content waiting for you.

Why I Finally Jumped In on Early Access

The only piece that really isn’t done yet is Act 5. Right now it’s a series of interlude segments rather than a full act, but even those give you a good chunk to play through.

Everything else feels complete. So my usual “wait for 1.0” rule went out the window.

The bigger reason I finally jumped in was a feature that fixed my one big fear. The passive tree and skill system in this series has always looked terrifying to me, a giant web of hundreds of nodes.

They added an option where you can download builds other people have created. It shows you step by step which passives to take on that massive tree, and exactly which skills and gems to slot in.

It’s an amazing feature. It’s genuinely the reason I decided now was the time to play.

I rolled a martial artist character and had an absolute blast with it.

Gameplay and Combat

From the opening area all the way to the endgame, the core loop is just plain fun. You fight through the different levels, you collect loot, you level up, and you’re pulling new gear constantly.

It never really lets up. There’s always a slightly better item to chase, a new skill coming online, or a fresh pack of enemies to smash through.

The martial artist in particular felt great to play. Close-range, fast, and satisfying in a way that kept me leaning forward the whole time.

This is the heart of why people love this game. The moment-to-moment combat is the good stuff, and it holds up for dozens of hours.

You Have Three Ways to Play It

The controls deserve a real mention, because they’re a big part of why this one clicked for me when the first game never did.

You get three options. There’s click to move, which I can’t stand and which was one of the main reasons I could never get into Path of Exile 1.

Then there’s WASD to move with the mouse for skills, and it feels fantastic. Moving with your left hand while aiming abilities with your right just makes the combat click.

The third option is a controller, and it’s surprisingly good. I honestly didn’t think a controller would work for a game like this, but it holds up better than I expected.

For a while at the start I bounced between two setups. One was on my 4K TV with an 8BitDo Pro 3 controller, the other was at my PC with an IQUNIX MQ80 keyboard and an EPOMAKER Carbonis mouse.

I ended up sticking with keyboard and mouse on the PC. The main reason is my ultrawide monitor, because the game looks absolutely fantastic in ultrawide.

Still, the controller support is worth trying. If you’d rather kick back on the couch with a TV, it genuinely works.

Story, World, and Presentation

The story is not going to blow your mind, and that’s fine. It’s a solid excuse to move you through some very cool places, and it does that job well.

You’re here for the gameplay and the loot anyway, which is why everyone will tell you it’s all about the endgame.

Where the game really shines is area design. Some of these zones are genuinely memorable.

The hub town in Act 2 is a standout. It’s a chain of giant carts lashed together, hauled across the desert by slaves, and it’s the kind of setting that sticks with you.

The graphics are excellent, with detailed environments and flashy, readable combat effects. The sound design hits hard, and the voice acting carries the story scenes better than it needs to for a game like this.

The Endgame Is Where It Opens Up

Beat the campaign and the game drops you onto a huge world map with basically unlimited levels and a pile of new mechanics.

This is where I had a ton of fun for a long stretch. You complete the new quests, explore different maps, keep leveling, and fill out the various Atlas passive trees.

The endgame is built around named mechanics that each have their own flavor.

Abyss sends you chasing cracks in the ground down to Lightless bosses.

Breach throws swarms of enemies at you through a spreading rift for big loot.

Delirium covers the map in fog and ramps up the danger the deeper you push.

There’s also Expedition and Ritual, each with its own Atlas skill tree to spec into. Filling those out and tuning your mapping strategy around them is a big part of the fun.

Then there are the pinnacle bosses tied to each mechanic. Some of these fights are fantastic.

The Arbiter of Ash is a wall of fire and heavy hits with a hard phase transition. Beat it and you unlock the path to the Arbiter of Divinity, the current top pinnacle boss, a fast and aggressive fight that keeps you moving.

Taking down all the pinnacle bosses for the first time was the highlight of my endgame. Those first clears felt earned.

Where It Lost Me

Then I hit a wall. Around level 88, the whole thing changed for me.

Experience slowed to a crawl. On top of that, you lose 10% of your XP when you die, which I hated every single time it happened.

My gear was also about as good as it was going to get. The only way forward was to grind out currency materials and use them to basically gamble for slightly better stats on my equipment, with a real chance of making an item worse.

That’s where I checked out. I don’t mind grinding for guaranteed rewards, but I can’t stand the gambling mechanics.

Everything gets pretty repetitive at that point too. You just run harder and harder maps and fight tougher versions of the same pinnacle bosses over and over.

So I stopped. I’d beaten every pinnacle boss once, I’d had a great time, and I’d hit the point where I’d had enough.

Here’s the honest part. Plenty of players love exactly this grind, and they’ll happily chase perfect gear for hundreds of hours. It just isn’t for me.

Free to Play, but You’ll Pay for Stash Tabs

The game will be free when it hits version 1.0. The money comes from cosmetics and features like stash tabs.

You will need certain stash tabs. The game gets close to unplayable in the late game without them.

I bought the currency tab, which is a must-have, plus the fragment and map tabs since those three are the ones everyone recommends. I picked up a couple more with my leftover coins, the augment tab and the gem tab, and both were useful.

Buy the game now on Steam and you get 300 coins to spend on tabs and cosmetics. That’s a nice head start.

My one gripe is the coin system. If you need more, you buy them in fixed chunks like 100 or 200 at a time, which pretty much guarantees you’ll have some left over and end up spending more real money than you actually needed.

Tips Before You Dive In and the Verdict

A few things will save you a lot of grief. First, watch or read some endgame guides before you get there.

There’s an overwhelming amount to learn, and a guide keeps you from running maps inefficiently and burning yourself out. This endgame progression guide helped me a lot.

Second, check poedb.tw before you spend coins. The stash tabs go on sale every few weeks, and the site has a countdown timer to the next sale so you can time your purchases and save money.

Third, grab a good loot filter. After a few acts you’ll be drowning in drops and you don’t need to grab everything, so I ran the one from FilterBlade.

So where does that leave us?

For the 105 hours I played, I had a ton of fun and didn’t want to do anything else, right up until the endgame gambling wall stopped me cold.

If you want the best ARPG available today, this is it.

Just go in knowing that the deepest part of the endgame is built for a specific kind of grinder, and if that’s not you, you’ll still get a massive, satisfying game before you reach that point.

View my playthrough in the YouTube playlist below:

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Images in this article are from the Path of Exile 2 page on Steam and used under Fair Use.