Hero Siege

People complaining that they "removed" expansions seem to be completely unaware that they are part of the base game now, and are found in the same place as they always were:
• Karp of Doom was Act 5, and is still Act 5.
• Depths of Hell was Act 6, and is still Act 6.
• Wrath of Mevis was Act 7, and is still Act 7.
Any Collectors Edition content (which is cosmetic) is STILL there, tied to your account... and is now exclusive to people who bought it before they rolled the expansions into the main game.
As for "never needing to log in", the log in is only for online play, and has ALWAYS been required for online play. You can still play offline as you have always been able to.
The game did go through a pretty major shift in game play mechanics...
It was previously a 'rogue lite' Diablo clone with almost platformer like mechanics -- You would collect up to 30 relics that provided various boosts and abilities, typically obtained from chests at the end of a jumping puzzle/challenge. When you died, even in "softcore", you lost all of your relics and needed to start over again.
Now the game is a more traditional Diablo-clone but with the jump mechanics retained. You no longer lose your relics on death, but are limited to 4 (which you can level up by collecting copies).
It would have been nice if they kept the original game as a separate mode offline, but the devs are a small studio and honestly the game has enough interface bugs/issues as-is.

Honestly, the game has been hit really hard by the reviews for the revamp.
As a new player I can only judge the content as it is, so if you're reading for that - this is one of them.
The game has a lot of classes and variety, a ton of items, a loot filter and a very unique gameplay loop (very similar to Vampire Survivors in a way).
If you like aRPGs, this game is one for when you're playing in the off-season of your main aRPG - absolutely no question about it. And given how well it runs and how few bullshit deaths there are in the game, this is also quite nice on Hardcore or SSF (you actually get drop increases in SSF).
Highly, highly recommended for the absurdly low price. Less than a dollar on sale, about 15 euros total if you want all the classes and DLC.

I started playing the game when it was first released — it was quite different back then, more of a rogue-like with waves of monsters to kill.
Now, Hero Siege has become a solid hack 'n' slash that's enjoyable to play every season.
It's a seasonal hack 'n' slash with a wide variety of classes (some of which are unlocked through DLCs, though they're never too expensive), and a talent tree that keeps improving with each new season.
If you've played Last Epoch, it's a similar concept: a global skill tree for the class, plus individual trees for each ability.
It follows the formula of most major hack 'n' slash games nowadays — endgame bosses, map farming, targeted farming for specific items, and a fast-paced “zoom zoom” gameplay.
I definitely recommend it — if I’ve played 1500 hours, that says a lot about how worth it the game is.

This game is nice and fun, and I don't really mind some classes being bought as DLC, but the slot limit is really nefarious for a business model. They should at least give players 3 slots.

15 Hour Review:
At the time of change (From No to Yes) my initial review (seen below) had 99 Helpful, 7 Funny, 1 Take My Points Award, 2 Jester Awards, 1 Super Star Award, 1 Extra Helpful Reward.
Can I Recommend the game: Sure
Should you buy the game at full price, I dont think so. I think you should wait till it goes on sale (which is supposedly does regularly, as seen by the 80% Sale followed immediately by a 66% sale).
The game itself is enjoyable. Im not one for making my own build in arpgs and just want to be able to follow something and enjoy. For anyone looking to try the game out look up Graxy on Youtube if you want beginner guide that goes over literally everything and has some build guides.
Like I said though the game is decently fun. I caved and spent the $16 on the expansion/all classes bundle because one of the classes looked fun and $16 for everything wasnt a bad deal. Overall combat is simple yet engaging you can play and turn brain off for the most part but be prepared to die to mobs with multiple mods that one shot. Act 1-3 bosses are challenging mechanically but well designed fights (mostly). Acts 4 and on where cake walks in comparison.
Loot can be exciting to find however like in my initial review, the loot filter is hot garbage. Coming from filters like Neversinks Customizer for POE or even Last Epochs filter, the limited options and way the highlight filter works leaves something to be desired (the highlight will highlight any items with 1 of the selected mods meaning you are picking up 1 mod items 90% of the time that arent upgrades). The presets they have are mediocre and dont really show/highlight lots of things that could be upgrades. However after 2 hours of tinkering with the filter I managed to make something that worked decently well for myself and found the occasional upgrade.
Another issue I had came from Runewords/Crafting. The tiers and quality of items isnt well explained and what runewords are or even how to use them isnt well explained either. However once you understand them and have your filter set to help find the items you need you can get gear upgrades and powerful buffs which make the game feel much faster.
I have managed to beat Normal difficulty (levels 0-50) and have progressed into Nightmare and will likely push on to endgame. If you can knuckle down and try to understand 1-2 of the systems youll get better at gearing and blast which can be a lot of fun. Again I recommend Graxy on Youtube as he has a lot of videos explaining things such as runewords and the filter.
So can I recommend the game in its current form (season 6) with what little ive played. Yes.
Does it suck that a lot of classes are stuck behind a paywall. Yes.
Do you really need to spend the money to buy all the extra tabs/space. Nope.
Was my initial review complaining about monetization fair. Nope (its on par with POE)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Original Review: (Which was a No for Recommending at the time, final edit was made around hour 4-5)
im 15 minutes into the game and already I dont like what I see. While the gameplay, skill system, and loot is okayish. My main issue is that 2/3rds of the playable classes are locked behind a paywall ($5-$8 per character when not on sale). You have to buy each one individually.
Then on top of that the game markets itself as against pay 2 win but then has a awful monetization system:
$5 per inventory expansions
$5 per stash expansions
$5 per material expansions
$5 per socketable expansion
$15 for unique expansion
Then on top of that there is a paid expansion already which has quests and items you cant get without buying the expansion. Tack on $12 skins and $0.50-$1 "companions" and this game just has cash grab written on it. Then they also have a subscription you can purchase on top of that for $4 a month which they lock the ability to rename tabs/inventory, see if an item has dropped because of magic find, rename hero, chat emotes, and cursor skins all behind.
I can defend POE with there tab costs because the content is there and the stash they provide is plenty for most new players and the game is free. Where as this game is $8 not on sale and then as soon as you boot up you get hit with a "well here is more ways to spend money right off the bat"
The devs seem to atleast update it but the monetization I get hit with seeing in the first 15 minutes is a huge turn off for me.
Ill change to positive if the game is good enough to get over that, if its still negative just know that the game was mid or worse. If you do buy it wait until they do another 80% off sale to try it and get it for $1.5 like I did. No shot I was paying $8 for this.
Edit: The loot filter is absolute garbage. You can have it selected to where you dont want Common Axes to show up and even with it set up common axes still show up. The only way to hide loot is using presets which is garbage.
Edit 2: Loot filter is still garbage and doesnt function plus the UI menus are buggy af. took me 3 minutes to exit the shops buy/sell menu
Edit 3: watched youtube beginner vid that was mid in terms of helping. got to what I assume is the act 1 boss using the ingame preset filter and just get rekt over and over, damage feels like garbage. the game overall is a solid 6/10. gameplay seems fun from videos and streams but actually playing felt like ****. POE was easier to understand and learn. tried 5-6 classes and they all felt awful mainly because gearing is **** all.

Hero Siege is a decent co-op ARPG with plenty of content to grind. I would strongly suggest waiting for a big sale to buy it.
Positives:
- Co-op works pretty well once you get in a game together. Having more people can make farming a lot more efficient. If your friends are further along then you can leech to help you catch up faster.
- A lot of classes with many different skills and most active skills can have their behavior customized resulting in a lot of possible builds.
- A lot of opportunities for gear upgrades and sidegrades as you make your way into endgame.
- There's an in game auction house which works even when you're not online.
- There's a lot to grind for and you can make good progress into the endgame with a reasonable investment of time.
Negatives:
- The monetization is really not great. 14 of 22 classes are not included in the base game and are $5-$8 each or you can get them all for $88. The 8th act is not included in the base game and costs $9. There is no single town that has your mailbox, the auction house, your guild stash, etc. in it, but if you subscribe for $5/month you can get a personal house that has everything. This all seems excessive to me and most of it should just be in the base game.
- Requires a separate account for online/co-op. Some online features, such as trading and guilds, require you to verify your email but their verification must be manual, or something equally atrocious, since it can take days for said verification to reflect in game. I wish I could have it use my steam account instead.
- A lot of stats on gear are non-obvious and some could use clearer naming. What's the difference between "+10 to Lightning Skill Damage" and "+10 to Additive Lightning Damage"? The latter is only for attacks, obviously.
- The auction house UI is very unintuitive and lacking useful search/filtering functionality. This makes it very hard to figure out what, if anything, your item might be worth and equally hard to find items that meet your needs.
- The auction house has both a listing fee (1%) and sales tax (10%). The former can be a bit unfortunate if you find a really expensive item when you don't have enough money to list it. The latter seems unnecessary to me but maybe it's intended as a gold sink. Many people bypass both of these by selling expensive items for runes instead of gold.
- There's an option when hosting a game to allow steam friends to not have to enter a password to join but the process to get that to happen is very janky. You first join their game via the steam friends list which will bring you to the character select screen. After that you'll be looking at the chat/lobby screen where you need to hit the hamburger menu above the server list and type in their game name, which I hope you know, then hit the refresh button. As soon as the server pops up in the list you should get shunted to a loading screen for actually joining your friend's game.

While the current version of the game is good, it feels like a bait-and-switch as the game is drastically different than the original version that I paid for. Granted, I only paid a couple bucks for it at the time, so it's not a big loss.
The game used to have some rogue elements to it, where you collect relics that give you different abilities and you could stack and collect a ton of these to build a ridiculously powerful and unique character. Once you learn what each relic does, you can tailor the relic collecting to match a desired build. Once you die, you lose the relics and you start over. All of that is gone now.
The current version of the game is a Diablo clone, and, while pretty good and worth a thumbs up by itself, I miss the old version of the game. I'm guessing they did this because the original game was quick, cheap fun, and probably couldn't retain players for that long. With a Diablo style and purchasable things, it probably makes them more money while retaining players.
I wish I could thumbs up the game while giving the bait-and-switch a thumbs down.