Grim Dawn. The Candy Crush of Action RPG's.
I'm not sure i like this, but i keep playing? The fighting reminds me a lot of digging in Terraria, it's not like the digging was that fun or hard, but it gets you stuff. I want to see what the next stuff is, and the next, ok, just one more hour.. no, make it two.
I am rather shocked at its genericness. Wasn't this a KS project? Were the "hardcore" fans happy with this outcome?? Or was it made clear from the start that it was going to be for the Candy Crush-generation?
No, you're right - it's pretty awful when it comes to the actual moment-to-moment gameplay.
Like Titan Quest before it, it's infested with "passive skill" syndrome - meaning the majority of your build revolves around passive enhancements to a tiny handful of active skills, which gets boring way too soon - as your build hardly changes in terms of the things you actually do.
Mechanically, it's a solid game - and I like how items grant actual unique skills - but unfortunately, I've yet to feel like I needed more than 2-4 skills to succeed from beginning to end.
Doing the exact same thing for 30+ hours gets really stale. It doesn't exactly help that the engine is something of a slog - and the areas are incredibly samey and dreary to look at.
I know there are builds where you need more, but that doesn't really help matters when my own playstyle doesn't jive with that.
Personally, I would recommend Path of Exile or Diablo 3 - if you want to play this particular genre and you want the actual gameplay to be fun.
For my own part, I've sort of moved towards the looter shooter genre to get this kind of fix - but there's really only one of them that I like enough to call it a serious competitor as a replacement for PoE or D3.
That would be Hellgate London - but it's so old these days.
Games like Destiny 2, Division, Warframe, Borderlands, Shadow Warrior 2 - and so on - are all great fun, and certainly much more visceral than Grim Dawn - but they're all rather superficial and shallow in terms of progression and depth when compared to the better Diablo clones. Well, ok, Warframe is definitely not shallow (I think it's probably the most rich in complexity out of all the games mentioned in this post) - but it's absurdly grindy and has almost zero content that's meaningful or worth pursuing, sadly.
Talking about ideal middle-ground, if you haven't tried it, I highly recommend the Lord of Terror campaign for NWN - if you can stand the old quirky stuff.
While 3rd Edition D&D doesn't have that many active skills (unless you're a spellcaster or you go out of your way to be feat-heavy) - it does have an absurd amount of progression weight.
Meaning, each and every level feels truly significant - which is very, very unlike Grim Dawn - where most of them feel like you're just adding a few percentages of something with the occasional and mostly superfluous added toy.