Grinding Gear Games' free-to-play loot grinder rebuilds its own economy and endgame every few months, and thirteen years in, it's still the deepest build sandbox in the genre.
Official art · via Steam
Path of Exile has taken more of my time than any other game I own, multiple thousands of hours since Grinding Gear Games shipped it in October 2013, spread across a passive skill tree with well over a thousand nodes and more finished character builds than I've bothered to count. This review covers that original game, not Path of Exile 2, the separate, newer title the same studio releases and sells alongside it. Same universe, same studio, different client, different game.
Grinding Gear Games resets the game's economy every few months with a new league: a fresh mechanic bolted onto the core campaign, a fresh set of unique items to chase, and every character starting from zero currency and zero gear. That cycle is the reason a thirteen-year-old game doesn't play like one, and the numbers back it up: 89% positive across more than 249,000 all-time Steam reviews, "Very Positive" and holding. PC Gamer called it "an exceptionally generous free-to-play action-RPG" where "what it lacks in punch it makes up for in depth," a verdict from Metacritic's aggregated 86 critic score that still holds up more than a decade later.
The free-to-play model is the part that still shouldn't work and does. Every purchase in the cash shop is cosmetic or storage-related; nothing sold for real money touches a character's power, and the game has never needed a subscription or an expansion fee to keep shipping content. If you pay for anything here, you're paying for convenience and for looking good doing it, which is a rare thing to say about a free online RPG this large.
None of that comes with a real tutorial. Past the opening campaign, Path of Exile explains almost nothing about the systems that matter most, and the discussion boards agree: one veteran-player thread summarized it flatly as "not casual player friendly at all," with build viability narrowing fast for anyone not already leaning on outside guides. Getting good at this game means treating a wiki and a build calculator as part of the client.
Trading is the other real friction point. There's no in-client auction house, so buying or selling anything means posting on a third-party site and hoping a stranger answers a whisper, which players on the game's own forums describe plainly: "having to whisper people hoping they respond." It works, because the economy is real and the items matter, but it's a clunky system that the game has carried, mostly unchanged, for over a decade.
Path of Exile earns its spot as my most-played game by refusing to sand down its own complexity, not despite it. The onboarding cliff and the trading friction are real costs, and I paid both of them happily for thousands of hours, because everything on the other side of that learning curve is still the deepest build sandbox running in this genre.