As far as I know, the beginning of the game is a bit dark, but the enemies tend to standout from the environment, so it is not that hard to read your enemies and your characters.

The health bars felt alright, nothing too much different from health globes. Also, the game has a health regeneration system that is similar to CoD where you regen once you are out of combat. The trade off is, you get far lesser potions than other ARPG and as long as you are under attack, the health wont regen at all, so if you position yourself badly, prepare to die, i guess. The idea is cool, as it is similar to what D3 did with the health globes which is to keep the action going but it feels like the regen is a bit too fast and the delay is a bit too short. It is not punishing enough if you are playing like an idiot.

The map can be placed on the top right, like Torchlight 2. The UI is a bit unfinished though, as some parts of the UI felt kinda rough. It is functional though.

So, I hope you do not think that announcing Grim Dawn Alpha is cracked is a good idea. Pretty much every game's Alpha is cracked to be honest, however, most of them arent updated very frequently.

Probably will be released in 2015 from the looks of it.

Well, there is only one out of 3 acts in the game so far despite there are a lot of content to play with, the game is still quite rough on its edges. For me, its an pretty good game at the moment, namely its atmosphere and grim art style. Other than that, it still need a lot of polish. Act 2 will be released in coming months.

I am an alpha backer and i can confirmed that you are not required to party to play the game decently. It is playable solo now as the game doesnt even have multiplayer yet.

To me, it is literally Dark Souls + Diablo. I find Grim Dawn's Normal mode is comparatively harder than than say Diablo 3's Normal mode or Torchlight 2's Normal mode as enemies pack quite a punch especially in groups. While the game generally doesnt hold your hand through with nicely scaled enemies and properly marked quest area. You actually have to find the cavern where the first boss is located as it is not marked in the game itself while from time to time, you'll find some strange enemies that you'll have hard time killing them to outright killing you in 2 shots where it is deliberately designed to be quite punishing.

Also, despite the game doesnt procedurally generate new maps each time you play, the hand crafted maps felt a lot more open than say TQ or even Diablo 3 which encourages you to explore. Thats a very nice change for pace for me.

The multi class system from TQ is still present and I managed to get some interesting class combos from hell hound summoning melee tank which is a mix warrior and oculist which is a summoner class in the game. You can mix and match classes to your play style. 5 classes are announced so far while the 5th one will be added sometime next year, 4 of them are in the game now.

However, i didnt play much as I dont really want to spoil the game before retail version hits, so I had only played till the first boss. My bro played much much further than me and he said its pretty damn fun later on as it gets tougher and challenging later on.

The final game will have 3 acts. Probably an expansion after that.

It is just strange that Grim Dawn never really go on sale even though plenty Early Access has gone on sale.

The developers rarely put their games on sale where it only went on sale once in a Steam Flash sale. They do have a private investor who had injected a couple of hundred thousand into the development.

They will probably do a wipe at the end of the development but i think there is still a long way to go.

Please support the developers. These are one of the developers that I dont mind paying for because they are genuinely passionate about their game.

The game is playable on solo.

And it feels better to play solo due to the game's atmosphere and you do not want people hassling you to go somewhere while you explore the massive open world.