Grim Dawn is a beautiful beast of a game. And yes, before you say anything, I know it came out in 2016. It’s old. I get it. Before you close this tab and go back to doing whatever extremely normal thing you were doing, hear me out. Because I was exactly like you. I had this thing sitting in my Steam library after some ridiculous sale, completely untouched, silently judging me every time I scrolled past it. Then three friends and I finally decided to give it a shot together, and I am now a changed man. A broken man. A man who cannot stop talking about Grim Dawn to anyone who will listen, and several people who will not.

Playing Grim Dawn solo is already a dense, satisfying, genuinely fantastic experience. But playing it with friends? That turns it into something completely unhinged. Build composition suddenly matters. You’re coordinating, screaming across a Discord call, because one friend is charging ass-first into a room full of enemies that absolutely should have been approached with way more caution, and the other three of you are losing your minds trying to save them while desperately trying not to die yourselves. The game never asked for this chaos. We brought it ourselves, and we are very proud of that fact.

It’s beautiful.

Screenshot: Crate Entertainment

The More Friends You Add, the More Beautifully Wrong Everything Goes

With four players in the mix, enemy scaling does its thing. More health on everything, more danger lurking around every corner, more moments where the entire plan goes sideways in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. This sounds like it would be miserable, and occasionally it absolutely is, but it’s the kind of miserable that makes you immediately want to try again rather than spike your keyboard into the floor. Boss encounters turn into ten-second strategy sessions that completely fall apart the moment someone gets impatient. Big fights become events. Something to survive and then immediately lose your mind about on the Discord call afterwards.

We have had moments in Grim Dawn that I am going to be telling people about for years. And we are not even done with the first playthrough yet.

Look, Diablo IV Is Good. Grim Dawn Is Just Built Different, and I’ll Die on This Hill.

Alright, let’s address the obvious. Diablo IV exists, it’s gorgeous, and plenty of people absolutely love it. I get it. I’ve sunk my own time into it. But after diving headfirst into Grim Dawn with three friends, the differences between these two games become so damn stark that it gets genuinely hard to go back to Diablo IV without thinking about everything Grim Dawn does that its bigger, flashier, much more expensive competitor flat out doesn’t.

The single biggest one, and I cannot stress this enough: Multiclassing.

In Grim Dawn, you pick a class called a Mastery at the start. Then, around level 10, the game hands you a second one and basically says, ” Alright, go absolutely nuts”. These two Masteries combine into a Dual Class, and the number of possible combinations is enough to make your head spin most wonderfully. Want to be a melee brawler who also commands a full undead army? Done. A spellcaster who ignores every self-preservation instinct they have and wades directly into melee like a complete disaster of a human being? Valid as hell. A pet class that poisons everything in a twenty-foot radius while hanging back and watching the chaos unfold from a safe distance, judging everyone? That’s that good shit.

HE’S HACKIN’ AND WHACKIN’ AND SMACKIN’

Right now, our group of four has four completely different Dual Class builds running simultaneously. Weaknesses get covered. Synergies get accidentally discovered that none of us planned for. One friend has committed so hard to a summoner build that his entire screen is just a wall of shambling undead at all times, and it’s genuinely one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.

Diablo IV does not do this. You pick a class. That’s your class. Forever. It does a ton of things incredibly well, but the sheer identity flexibility that Grim Dawn drops in your lap is on a completely different level. After a week in Grim Dawn, the idea of being locked into a single class feels almost quaint. Cute, even.

Screenshot: Crate Entertainment

The World of Cairn Actually Feels Like It Has a History

The other massive gap between these two games is world-building, and this is where Grim Dawn really separates itself. Diablo IV is spectacular to look at, and its open world is enormous and genuinely gorgeous. But Grim Dawn’s world of Cairn is something else entirely. Handcrafted from the ground up, with factions that have their own grudges and agendas, towns full of survivors who feel like they’ve been through absolute hell and are somehow keeping it together, barely. The lore is tucked into everything: notes, dialogue, environmental details that reward you for actually paying attention rather than just sprinting past everything to get to the next fight.

There are two major factions in the base game, and your relationships with them actually change things in meaningful ways. Vendors shift, the world responds differently, and quest outcomes diverge. When you’re playing with friends, and all four of you have committed to different faction allegiances just to see what breaks? That alone is worth the price of admission. Diablo IV has lore, sure. But Grim Dawn has a world that feels like it existed long before you showed up, and will keep on existing long after you’re gone. That’s a genuinely hard thing to pull off, and Crate absolutely fucking KILLED IT.

The Audacity of This Game Looking This Damn Good

“Isn’t that game old?” Yes. It is. Came out in 2016. Full release, multiple expansions, years of updates. And it still looks legitimately, genuinely great. Not taking questions on this. Sit down.

The environments in Grim Dawn are dark, dense, and absolutely dripping with atmosphere. Ruins feel properly, thoroughly ruined. Forests feel suffocating in a way that makes you want to move through them quickly. Underground caverns nail that claustrophobic feeling where you know you’re just sitting in a chair in your house, but something in the back of your brain is still a little twitchy about it. The art direction here is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting, and because everything is viewed from a top-down perspective, every single ounce of that craft is on display all the time, with nowhere to hide.

Screenshot: Crate Entertainment

It Holds Up. It Genuinely, Actually, Amazingly holds up.

When you’ve got four players running through Grim Dawn simultaneously, and everything is exploding, and spell effects are going off in every direction, and your summoner friend’s undead army is absolutely demolishing something enormous in the middle of the screen, it still looks fantastic. Spell effects are readable and satisfying without becoming visual noise. Enemy designs are varied and creepy in ways that feel deliberate and considered. The environmental storytelling makes Cairn feel like a place that had a pulse, or at least a place that used to have one before everything went catastrophically wrong.

On top of all that, it won’t destroy lower-end machines, which actually matters when you’ve got a group of four and not everyone is rocking a top-tier rig. Nobody gets left out. Everybody plays. There is a specific kind of greatness to a game that delivers this much atmosphere and visual quality without needing cutting-edge hardware to do it, and Grim Dawn pulls it off with room to spare.

Stop Sleeping on This Game and Grab Three Friends Right Now

If Grim Dawn has been collecting digital dust in your library, fix that immediately. Call your friends. Boot it up. Accept that your weekend is already gone and that it’s going absolutely nowhere. The multiplayer takes an already great solo experience and cranks it up into a level of chaotic, screaming, build-theorycrafting, “why the hell did you just run in there” madness that I was completely and utterly unprepared for, and I could not be happier about it.

Our group is already deep in the weeds planning out what Dual Class combos we’re running on the next playthrough.

We haven’t finished the first one yet. We genuinely do not care. The planning has already started, and it’s not stopping anytime soon.