Last Epoch review

What is it? A Diablo-like action RPG with an emphasis on items.
Expect to pay: $35/£30
Developer: Eleventh Hour Games
Publisher: Eleventh Hour Games
Reviewed on: Windows 11, Intel Core i9, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060
Multiplayer? Yes
Link: Official site

The first thing most people hear about Last Epoch is that it's an action RPG with a clever trading system. And that's true, it does have smart mechanics for bartering gear and ranking up your affiliation with the Merchant's Guild to equip better purchased goods, which prevents you from making some canny deals and immediately walking off in endgame armor. But the thing that's really clever is that you can opt out entirely. 

When you reach the point where you're presented with the chance to join the Merchant's Guild, you can just say, «Nah, that's not for me, dog.» In that case, you get to join the Circle of Fortune, receiving an increase to item drops so you can find better gear out in the world by killing people and taking their stuff like God and Gary Gygax intended.

As someone who could not care less about auction houses in RPGs, this is ideal. I'm not here to play the medieval stock market, and feeling forced into one to keep up in a game like Lost Ark sucks. Last Epoch's approach to trading is smart, and it's one of many smart decisions it makes about items. Another is the loot filter, which doesn't just let you make common-rarity gear invisible beyond a certain point, but lets you get real fine-grained about which gear affixes you care about and want to see or not see when piles of stuff pinata out of the last spiky rat or gross bird you killed.

Crafting is another system with more thought than usual put into it. You can upgrade the bonuses gear has, add new ones, or remove them. The limits are each item's «forging potential» and whether you have enough affix shards for the relevant bonuses. If you're not hitting hard enough, you up a piece of gear's damage bonus, and if you want some more poison resistance you add