Last Epoch - Review In Progress

After almost five years in Steam Early Access, Eleventh Hour Games is finally releasing Last Epoch to the masses on Wednesday, February 21st. As the newest action role-playing game (ARPG) on the block, Last Epoch has already been compared to genre giants like Diablo and Path of Exile. Does Last Epoch deserve to be mentioned in such a distinguished crowd? I’ve only spent a handful of hours with Last Epoch, but I can already definitively say, eh, maybe.

Last Epoch: The Story

There is a South Park episode where the boys head to Fox Studios to talk to the writers of Family Guy. It turns out that the writing staff is actually a group of manatees that create the plot of each episode by randomly picking ‘idea balls’ that have a word written on them. I mention this because I believe that a modern APRG's plot is created similarly.

The setting for Last Epoch is Eterra. That’s almost the same as the very popular game setting of Terra, sometimes spelled Tera, but in this case, it’s also the name of a Goddess that has gone missing. We can’t call the player’s character ‘The Adventurer’ — that’s too generic — so let’s go with Traveler. It adds some mystique to the main character, doesn’t it?

Other than a short opening cinematic, we don’t know much about Eterra or the Traveler, but we do know that Eterra the Goddess is missing, and we can guess that makes things bad for Eterra the setting. Now, we need a group of NPCs that will give us quests, so let’s call them The Keepers. What are they keeping? Well, it turns out that the Keepers are sworn to serve Eterra, and there is one old guy, let’s call him Balthas, that is the Keeper of the Macguffin, er, Shard of the Epoch.

What is the Epoch? That’s a great question. The Epoch is an artifact that was created by Eterra to aid humanity when things are going bad. The Epoch allows you to control time, but if it gets into the wrong hands, then that could be a bad thing. So the Keepers split the thing into three pieces. We all know that never