Path of Exile

When many people hear that a game is free, a few things come to mind. One is that the game probably isn't very polished. The other is that there has to be a catch. To be fair, one or the other is usually true in the modern gaming world. There are a few free games, though, that are both professionally polished and that provide a great experience with no strings attached. One such game is Path of Exile, a free PC game that brings back the sort of gritty early 2000s loot-grinding game play in a form that modern gamers can digest.

Path of Exile is a loot-based action game. The basic gameplay loop is something you've probably experienced before - kill monsters, level up, and get loot so you can kill bigger monsters, level up more, and get better loot. It's the kind of game that makes days disappear when it's at its best, and the kind of game that makes you repeatedly kick the side of your PC when it's not working correctly. Path of Exile is a definite throwback to an earlier era of gaming, with all the good and ill that entails.

If you loved Diablo II or any of the dozens of games that attempted to cash in on its success, you'll love Path of Exile. Diablo II is the obvious point of comparison here, as Path of Exile hews closer to that game's mechanics than Diablo III. You'll pick from a small handful of potential character classes and spend most of your time agonizing over where to put your skill points. There are countless builds possible in the game, all of which revolve around more thoroughly destroying your enemies when you're on the hunt for better loot.

No game's perfect and Path of Exile definitely has some flaws. The biggest issue with the game is that it's incredibly poorly optimized - it gets choppy and slow even on reasonable machines, so you won't get the smooth experience you'd expect from a game in this genre. Of course, Path of Exile is far from the only game with optimization issues and even the standouts in the genre have their stuttering problems, so this is a problem that's easy to ignore most of the time. The other big issue is that the gameplay loop is incredibly repetitive - there might as well not be a story, so don't come here looking for one.

Path of Exile is, in many ways, the perfect kind of free to play game. Sure, there are some technical issues that keep it from being a classic, but it's almost impossible to be upset with what you're given for free. This is a fully-featured video game that doesn't spend its time trying to get money out of your wallet. If more free to play games could follow the example of Path of Exile, the genre probably wouldn't have such a bad reputation. If you enjoy games like Diablo, you owe it to yourself to pick up Path of Exile.