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We originally reviewed Path of Exile in 2013. It has changed significantly since then, so much so that we decided to review it again. Our original review can still be found here. For more about why we've chosen to re-review certain games, head here. NEED TO KNOW What is it? A huge free-to-play action-RPG Expect to pay: Free-to-play, or up to $45 for some cosmetic armour sets Developer: Grinding Gear Games Publisher: Grinding Gear Games Reviewed on: Intel i5-3570K @ 3.40 GHz, 16GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 970, Windows 10 Multiplayer? Yes Link: Official site CHECK AMAZON When you wash up on the shores of Wraeclast in Path of Exile’s opening moments, you’re a pitiful sight, completely lost and clad only in tattered rags. Survival means hitting wandering, bloated cadavers with driftwood until they explode. Take some time to appreciate the simplicity. From there, Path of Exile piles on the complexity and scope, transforming you from a shipwreck survivor into a god-killing, universe-jumping crusader. Path of Exile has always tried to stand apart from other modern ARPGs with its lore-soaked setting and daunting passive skill tree doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Since 2013, however, more and more has been heaped onto it, not just taking it in a different direction from, say, Diablo 3, but from the genre in general. It’s blessed with a unique identity—one that’s built on experimentation and constant evolution. If you’ve dabbled in other dungeon-delving romps, you’ll be familiar with the pattern of heading out into the wilderness to loot and kill—left and right clicking and hitting hotbar keys to attack and cast spells, Diablo-style—mopping up quests and becoming ludicrously powerful. But Path of Exile is still full of all manner of surprises. You can build a monster zoo, create your own hideout, or start fresh in a temporary world with new rules and weird twists. Image 1 of 4 A rare moment of peace and quiet. A rare moment of peace and quiet. Watch for giant blades! Watch for giant blades! Many areas are randomly generated, so grind for loot to your heart's content. Many areas are randomly generated, so grind for loot to your heart's content. It's a pretty big map. It's a pretty big map. Just when you feel like you might be done with it, Path of Exile transforms, beckoning you to make the ascent again and again. This isn’t an RPG that’s comfortable with sitting still for long periods of time. There’s always a new boss to kill, a new system to wrap your head around, or a weapon that you absolutely must have for your new character build idea. I get to just run around like a headless chicken, avoiding projectiles or getting swarmed by enemies, while my totems and the occasional summon do absolutely all the work. It can be a lot to take in, but the heart of Path of Exile remains its character progression—that journey from nobody to cosmic superhero—and the absurdly huge passive skill tree that represents that growth. It’s a complicated web of passive abilities and stats that buff your Exile with additional dexterity, intelligence, weapon proficiencies, spell damage and countless other modifiers, broad and situational. While you can pick from seven classes, like the tough Marauder or the hexy Witch, these determine where you begin on the web, not where you go once you start gaining new skill points. My Marauder might be a duel-wielding whirlwind of destruction, while yours could be an elemental shaman who uses magic more than brute strength, seeing you travelling across the skill tree in the opposite direction. Exotic builds are Path of Exile’s bread and butter, and even after four years theorycrafters show no signs of slowing down. The builds have only gotten wilder since the introduction of Ascendancy classes: Every class gets three subclass options, aside from the Scion, who gets a special class that lets her draw from the skills of all the others. To get access to these high-tier powers, you’ll need to tackle a series of trials and dungeons that dole out Ascendancy points across the game. These Ascendancy classes create focal points in an otherwise almost classless system, but they still maintain the level of freedom that makes creating an Exile so compelling. While the Ascendancy skill trees are much smaller than the mind-bogglingly huge passive skill tree you’ll normally use, they still offer up a multitude of paths for you to go down, even within a single subclass. Keeping it classy In my current run, I’ve been playing with a Hierophant, one of the Templar’s Ascendancy classes. It’s been a game-changer, letting me play with an almost pure-totem build. I get to just run around like a headless chicken, avoiding projectiles or getting swarmed by enemies, while my totems and the occasional summon do absolutely all the work. It’s bizarre essentially being a bystander in these fights. I suspect the novelty will wear off, but fooling around with builds and trying to find one that fits you, if only temporarily, is one of Path of Exile’s great joys. There are countless builds to suit just about every playstyle, whether you want the simple pleasure of making ♥♥♥♥ explode with a hammer or the more abstract pleasure of raising an army of skeleton mages who obliterate everything in your path. There are even AFK builds that rely on damage reflection, letting you just stand there and watch enemies crumble. While this does make an already daunting skill tree even more complicated, there are plenty of builds for new players, along with build walkthroughs, which go a long way to explaining Path of Exile’s elaborate but hard-to-parse progression systems. Steven has also put together a great list of starter builds created by Path of Exile boffins, which includes the the Hierophant build I’ve been using. With the scope of the classes and subclasses being so huge, some suggestions or a recommended path would be valuable for new players. Other players do a fantastic job of serving as guides, but a lot of advice ends up conflicting, and even starter builds come full of jargon and the expectation that the reader has a decent handle on the basics. Path of Exile could maintain its openness while still nudging new players down a safe direction. Once you do get to grips with it, you might find yourself cooling on every other RPG’s character progression. It never feels like a powerful skill that could dramatically change your character is too far away, and there are countless opportunities to tweak a build to significant effect. Jewel slots play a big part in this, allowing you to add physical jewels to specific nodes on the tree, conferring powerful bonuses. A single jewel can make a whole class come together, and you’ll be able to unlock slots and get your hands on them very early on. Bejeweled Path of Exile is a laboratory where you create terrifyingly powerful

The long half-life of radioactive materials has presented a fundamental challenge to generations of scientists, politicians, and national and global communities alike. With a half-life of up to 4.5 billion years for uranium-238, the legacies of nuclear tests, uranium mining and radioactive waste management linger. It is Australia’s intimacy with the nuclear that Ian Lowe hopes to untangle in his new book Long Half-life: The Nuclear Industry in Australia, his latest contribution in a series of endeavours to enlighten the public on Australia’s ill-conceived pursuit of this industry.

The perplexity that surrounds radioactivity is central to Lowe’s work. Early in the piece, he quips that the long half-life of uranium baffles politicians as their ‘time horizon[s] rarely extend … beyond this year’s budget or next year’s election’ (p. 1). But it is not just long half-lives that induce trepidation. Lowe notes that meta-data on the effects of radioactivity is lacking and scientists have never been able to confidently agree on its degree of danger. As scientific opinions differ wildly on many aspects of the nuclear, confusion reigns. In response, laypeople – minimally informed and bewildered by the mixed messages – fall in the middle of the mess. The tendency has been for ‘people to choose the one [opinion] they would prefer to be right’ (p. 27). This, Lowe implies throughout, has been the case since the dawn of the nuclear age in Australia, guiding arguments both for and against the nuclear industry since its emergence in the 1950s.

But it is nuclear energy, rather than the nuclear industry writ large, that most concerns Lowe in this work. Despite nuclear energy presenting itself periodically as a ‘cleaner’ and ‘cheaper’ alternative to fossil fuels since as early as the 1950s, its use was (and is) indivisible from other uses of the nuclear. Lowe argues that the ill-fated British nuclear tests held in Australia (1952-63) ensured that questions of the viability of nuclear energy were entwined with desires for nuclear weapons (p. 42). Such intimacy between energy and weaponry persists. Lowe evokes this by placing this debate in its contemporary context: earlier this year, the Doomsday clock moved the closest it has ever been to midnight in response to the determination that the biggest threats to humankind in 2021 are nuclear weapons and climate change (p. 186). Lowe shows that nuclear energy sits at the nexus of these threats, as it always has.

But, further to this, and from the beginning of Long Half-life, it is clear that Lowe does not believe nuclear energy is economically viable. This will come as little shock to Lowe’s target audience: an already environmentally-conscious and presumably anti-nuclear one. Lowe uses Long Half-life to platform renewable energy as an alternative to the physically, environmentally, and financially damaging nuclear option. In doing so, he weaves together arguments against the nuclear with a call (to the Australian Government especially) to do something meaningful about climate change. Lowe draws upon his expertise in physics and environmental science to assure his reader that, while it once may have been, nuclear is not the answer to Australia’s current problems.

By placing our nuclear past in conversation with the current threat from anthropogenic climate change, Lowe provides insightful social commentary. However, it is easy to forget while reading Long-half life that it has been marketed by the publisher as a ‘history’, specifically a ‘social and political history of Australia’s role in the nuclear industry’. While reading, I was struck that the chapter on the development of global nuclear politics and the beginning of the Cold War was afforded seven pages, and only three endnotes. On the other hand, contemporary debates in South Australia regarding the disposal of nuclear waste are generously given nearly thirty. Yet there was little acknowledgement of the historic efforts of activists to overturn previous dump proposals in South Australia, most notably the 1998 National Waste Repository floated by the Howard Government.

Lowe deals with the contemporary politics of the nuclear in Australia in some depth (albeit omitting key scholars on the nuclear such as Wayne Reynolds and relying a little heavy-handedly on former-diplomat Richard Broinowski’s Fact or Fission? for historical analysis). However, the lived experience of the nuclear is markedly absent. In Long Half-life the human element of this story is mostly limited to the male politicians and scientists integrally involved in policy. Those most impacted by this policy dilemma are unfortunately lost among reports, scientific debates and statistics, with only vague mentions of the various communities who have pushed back against the nuclear, generation after generation.

This is not to say that Long Half-life is not a worthwhile book. Rather, it has been potentially mismarketed. To sell this book as a ‘social’ history is a disservice to what Lowe has done within its pages, chiefly in illuminating the debates surrounding the nuclear industry from the perspective of someone intimately familiar with it. I agree with Monash University Press’ assertion that Lowe is ‘uniquely qualified to tell this story’. His status as a ‘nuclear expert’ is undeniable. And, as one makes their way through Long Half-life, it becomes increasingly clear that it has been written from the perspective of someone who fears for the consequences of his generation’s actions on those to come.

Ultimately, Long Half-life is a treatise on how to consider the adverse effects of our actions. Indeed, Dave Sweeney and Peter Garrett endorse this volume as a ‘cautionary tale’ and a ‘clarion call for sanity’. And so, in keeping with its overall themes, Lowe concludes Long Half-life with a powerful call to arms: ‘[o]ur decisions are creating the future in which our descendants will live. I believe we should be working to give them the legacy of a clean and secure future, not one clouded by radioactive waste and fear of nuclear war’ (p. 208). Effective social history or not, it is hard to argue with that.

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