Path of Exile

PATH OF EXILE

Path of Exile is a game a friend has started me playing recently, and so far I'm pretty hooked on it, even though I haven't had time to play it and get far in it.

Path of Exile (POE) is a free to play top down MMORPG, supported by micro transactions. The story and game is fully accessible no matter if you are a free to play player, or a supporter of the game with micro translations, though the game may be slightly harder for the former. The games open beta was released on 23 January 2013 and the game was officially released on 23 October 2013.

The player controls a single character from an overhead perspective and explores large outdoor areas and underground caves or dungeons, battling monsters and fulfilling quests from NPCs  (non player characters) to gain experience points and equipment. The game borrows heavily from the Diablo series of games by Blizzard. All areas in the game, besides the central encampments are randomly generated for maximum playability 

Path of Exile is unusual among action-RPG games in that there is no in-game currency. The game's economy is based on bartering currency items. Unlike traditional game currencies, these items have their own inherent uses (such as upgrading an item's rarity level, rerolling affixes, or improving an item's quality) and thus provide their own money sinks to prevent inflation. Most of these items are used to modify and upgrade equipment, though some identify items, create portals to town or grant skill refund points.

Leagues

The game offers several alternate play modes, or Leagues. Currently, the following leagues are available in the game:
Standard – This is the default gameplay league. Characters who die here respawn at the last checkpoint, normally where you transitioned into the area, or a waypoint, on higher difficulties you lose Exp on death

Hardcore – Characters cannot be resurrected but instead respawn back in the Standard league. This mode is analogous to permadeath in other games.

Current temporary (challenge) leagues:

Breach – Players encounter Breaches throughout the game. When touched, a Breach opens and releases a large horde of monsters for the player to fight back. Breach monsters can drop fragments of their corresponding type, and combining these fragments can lead to unique endgame boss fights that have a chance to drop powerful new unique items.

Hardcore Breach – The hardcore variant of the above challenge league.

Personal thoughts

Since I have started playing the game I have been hooked on it, the customisation options with the ingame talent tree allows for a huge number of different charter builds, the community is amazing and helpful, and for any difficulties ingame there is a party system, allowing you to team up with others to complete quests, amazing enemys, challenging fights and a decent pvp system, so overall in my opinion, a great game :)