Grim Dawn (PC) review "Slay your way"

I'll be honest about one thing: I barely paid attention to Grim Dawn's story. Yes, this is kind of a dig on the game, but it's also back-handed praise. It featured some neat lore about humanity making contact with interdimensional creatures called “Aetherials.” This meeting led to a war with some other beings called “Cthonians,” which plunged the world in chaos and constant conflict. Humans possessed by Aetherials acquire their powers, even after the being in question had been exorcised. That's where you come in: you've been possessed by an Aetherial and lived to tell the tale. Now, branded as a “Taken,” you battle the creatures of the night in the hopes of sending them back to whatever hell they crawled out of...

From there, I don't remember much. Some high-ranking officer tells you to go to a place and kill a villain, which leads to him instructing you to go somewhere else and scotch another antagonist, which... I think you get the picture. I'm pretty sure there was more to the storyline than this, but it paled in comparison to Dawn's standout feature: customization.

Yes, this title is both a Diablo clone and a spiritual successor to Titan Quest, and its mechanics lean as hard into both of those identities as possible. Here, you hack up hordes of zombies, spectral beings, otherworldly horrors, and necromancers using simple, point-and-click mechanics supplemented by special skills and deep character building. As with Diablo you acquire various pieces of equipment that reinforce your character's build, be it a melee specialist, a magician, a rogue, or a maniacal mesh thereof. Here's the thing, though: there are so many different combinations of warriors you can craft, with numerous classes on offer and the prospect of dual-classing. You don't merely create a “soldier” class, who excels in hand-to-hand combat, but augment that guy with an “occultist” or “demolitionist” secondary, which allows you to ponder as to how you can make a short-range character even more complex. Hell, during my own playthrough, I picked soldier as a secondary class, allowing me to craft a character whose main strategy was to bash everything in sight. However, pairing that up with the “nightblade” classification allowed me to strike hard and fast while also occasionally inflicting bleed upon my opponents, causing their health to deteriorate while I chopped them up.



That's not all: you also secure tainted shrines throughout the campaign that allow you to gain passive skills called “devotion.” You accomplish them by gaining devotion points, then using them to activate stars on a chart. Upon completing whole constellations, you gain additional points that unlock further constellations. Each collection of stars grants a different themed set of skills and abilities, with some focusing on physical menace and others granting you deeper magical capabilities, status afflictions, or various types of damage.

That setup, more than anything, kept me playing. I would scour whole maps, blasting away at whatever I could, picking up any side quest in the hopes of leveling up quickly so I could watch my combatant grow. Constant battle and completion of various tasks for different factions and towns granted me further reputation. The citizens began to trust me, so they loaded me up with more side missions—some of which granted me access to secret areas—or even offered me improved equipment in their shops.

This game never stops showering you in gifts, in fact. As you butcher enemies, many of them drop new items. Any time you open a chest, multiple goodies pop out. Hell, killing sub-bosses or adversarial champions also yields whole batches of goods that either improve your equipment or serve as handy merchant fodder. On top of that, you can warp back to town for free, unlike the original Diablo forcing you to either learn a spell or remember to buy scrolls that cast the “town portal” magic. Here, you have a permanent doorway that can be used almost anywhere, costs nothing, and also acts as a checkpoint for when you perish. It remains open after you croak, allowing you to venture through a town's gate and back to where you last opened your own portal.



As you advance, the beasts you battle become even battier. You move on from standard undead corpses to pulpy hulks and feathery harpies, not to mention entire farmlands full of massive maggots and possessed scarecrows. After that, you bump into manticores, abominable snowmen, and rodents covered in crystals. Granted, it's almost hilarious the way this game ostensibly opened a D&D monster manual and started pointing at random pages to fill its bestiary, yet it lends to the game's maddening qualities in an exciting way. Some creatures smack of nights huddled around a table, rolling dice and annoying a game master. Others remind you of monster films and B-movies. Yes, you still have some of your stock fiends, too...

And you chop through droves upon droves of these beasts, constantly refiling your hit points with the dozens of potions your targets drop while minding your surroundings. No, Dawn's campaign isn't by any means complex. You craft a character and use it to off boatloads of creatures in an effort to win a war for humanity against Lovecraftian overlords. There's really not much more to the experience than that.



As I stated, Dawn's main draw revolves its extensive character sheet and constant replays. After finishing the campaign, you unlock another difficulty level. With that added onto the boon you've already been handed, you restart the affair with a ramped-up challenge factor and healthier rewards, replaying the insanity in a much tougher and more gratifying way.

Action-RPGs like this one aren't complicated, but they require a lot of work on the part of the developer to not only write up interesting lore, but also provide a tremendous number of specters and beasts to bash up while balancing a challenge factor, experience levels, and rewards. Grim Dawn effectively commits to this act while providing a fun little diversion rife with more monster slaying and stat building than you could ever want.

Community review by JoeTheDestroyer (October 11, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.