enemies

POE1 | 3.26 – When Your MERCENARY has a better build than you – YouTube

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Path of Exile’s new mercenaries are very strong. Unlike Diablo 4’s mercs, PoE’s are essentially NPC allies using all the same gear and items a player could. At high enough levels, they’re arguably better than we could ever be—tireless soldiers on the frontlines of the war for loot.

PoE streamer Pohx Kappa discovered this firsthand soon after the new league (read: season) started. Despite running an AOE-based build made for running through enemies and leaving their smoldering corpses behind, his merc simply deleted every monster in sight before he could even touch them.

“I can’t even hit anything!” Pohx exclaims while watching his merc wipe the screen clear of enemies with a wave of energy bolts. “I can’t even explode the mobs!” he said, realizing he was now playing PoE like it was a walking simulator.

Grinding Gear Games may have made mercs a little too powerful. There are already clips of streamers playing in hardcore getting unexpectedly one-tapped by them. You’re allowed to take a peek at their equipment before accepting a duel against them, but there are some skill combinations that might be doing too much damage.

If you can survive the duel, however, you can have them at your side while you clear out maps. Most experienced PoE players seem to be loading them up with supportive items, like a weapon that prevents elemental ailments from affecting nearby allies (AKA: you). We’re still early in the league though, so I expect players will discover even more broken ways to set them up soon.

Pohx’s experience is apparently what it’s like to bring a merc along with you while you’re leveling up a new character. Mercs can stick around as long as they’re within 20 levels of you, so some people are keeping a few around to power level themselves later.

I’ll be very curious to see how GGG decides to balance them. Surely it will make sure they don’t pop players out of nowhere, but nerfing them so you don’t randomly find one with a better build than you might kind of ruin the fun. That said, nobody would want a meta where you’re the support as your merc does all the work for you, right?

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If you pine for the rotting corridors and tactical limb-surgery of Dead Space, it looks like Bloober’s upcoming Cronos: The New Dawn may have you covered. Fresh from revealing that they’re remaking the first Silent Hill, the Polish team have released a new trailer for Cronos that shows off more of its bubble-suited third-person gunnery.

In particular, it spotlights the Merge mechanic, whereby guttural tendril beasts known as Orphans devour the corpses of their brethren to enhance their abilities. It’s implied that they can do this more than once, so be sure to clean up after yourself. As in so many other walks of life, punctual incineration may be the cure.

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I find the trailer interesting for a couple of reasons. The simpler draw is that, yes, this sure does reek of Dead Space, my beloved. In particular, the Merging mechanic calls to mind those awful Necromorph facehugger equivalents who’d scuttle around reanimating cadavers. And let’s not forget the crawling arms and legs that’d sneakily join up into a Biggermorph if left unattended. How I hated them. Can’t fault the animation, though. Excellently horrible.

The other reason that interests me is that it’s continuing a theme for Bloober, a developer who love to tell stories about torturously overlapping dimensions. Observer – Bloober’s best game to date, for my money – explored the familiar cyberpunk premise of ailing flesh and masonry corrupted by digital technology. The Medium gave you a splitscreen view of 90s Poland and an adjoining fungal purgatory inspired by Zdzis&lstrok;aw Beksi&nacute;ski’s surrealist landscapes. And in Cronos: New Dawn, you’re an agent of the “Collective” alternating between a shattered post-apocalypse and the 1980s, your job being to digitise and extract lost souls from the past for safe archiving in the future. All of this reflects Bloober’s creative debts to the Silent Hill series, with its parallel realities.

Those themes extend into a mechanical focus on the implications of blending things or splitting them apart. In Observer, the splicing of digital and non-digital realms produces a grating, fizzy nightmare, to be forensically dissected using your bionic eye. In The Medium, you’ll cut through seams of flesh with an icky razor even as you try to reconcile the architecture of the mundane and the otherworldly. And in Cronos, you have to worry about merging enemies, which seems to parody the Collective’s goal of recovering and pooling the electronic spirits of the long-dead.

I realise this is quite fast-and-loose analysis, but in my defence, I am writing up a 90 second trailer in the fateful closing moments of the working day, racing against the sunset to finish a piece, and it was either this or waxing lyrical about gunfeel. Cronos: The New Dawn is out later this year on Steam and Epic Games Store.

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‘I can’t even hit anything’: Path of Exile player watches helplessly as his mercenary wipes out screens of enemies before he can even reach them

Cronos: The New Dawn trailer shows off Dead Space combat and merging enemies