Alright, so I think now is a good time to stop with this
explanation of why I haven't posted a review in a bit, because I fear if I go
much longer I'll end up with a poorly written romance novel. Maybe title it 50
levels of Ember?
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| Actually, I'm currently 74. And an Engineer. Yeah, I don't know how that would work. |
Torchlight 2 is an Action RPG. That is a subset of games
that includes other titles such as Diablo or Titan's Quest. It's the type of
game where you start a hero, level him or her by slaughtering ludicrous amounts
of evil minions, dump points into increasing individual stats and unlocking
abilities, and generally engage in a nearly endless quest for ever better gear.
In sort, it's the type of game that can suck all the free time out of your
life.
If you've never played this type of game before, it's pretty
simple, and Torchlight 2 doesn't deviate from the basics too much. Each time
you level up you gain five attribute points and one skill points. The attribute
points you'll use to increase your four base stats: strength, dexterity, focus,
and vitality. Each stat does a couple of things for you, and, depending on what
role you want to take on with you character, you could end up with an entirely
different point distribution than another player. For example, strength will
increase the damage you do with your
weapon, as well as the amount of damage you'll inflict when you land a
critical strike. That sounds great, but you might want to mix that in with some
dexterity, which increases the chance you'll actually perform a critical
strike, increases your dodge, and reduces the penalty for fumbling an attack.
Focus ups your mana and magic damage, as well as increasing your odds of
striking with two single handed weapons at the same time. Vitality increases
your health, armor, and block. Not only do these attributes impact things like
your damage or damage avoidance, but items usually require a certain point
allocation, or character level, to equip.
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| Outlanders are a ranged class, and much of their gear requires a lot of dexterity to use. |
That other thing you gain when you level up is a skill
point, which you use to unlock a special skill. In Torchlight, each character
class has three different skill groups. I say groups because each skill is
independent in terms of how you go about unlocking it, whereas other games
utilize a skill tree with prerequisites, though in many cases certain skills
will prove more beneficial when coupled with others, like an Engineer's passive
skill that increases fire damage, and an active skill that deals fire damage to
enemies. There are seven different skills and three passive skills per group,
each of which you can put fifteen points into. Active skills also have special
thresholds, such that when you put 5, 10, or 15 points into that skill, you
gain some sort of bonus, like increasing the active range of a stun. While that
makes it very attractive to max out every skill, that just isn't possible,
since you'll end up with 132 total points, with 100 coming from leveling up and
another 32 coming from fame, a mechanic Torchlight utilizes that rewards you
for killing special named monsters called champions. Furthermore, skills have
level requirements, both to acquire the option to invest in a skill initially,
and to progress beyond a certain number of points in that skill. For example,
my level 74 Engineer cannot have any more points in his Sledgebot summon
ability until level 78, despite already having 11/15 points invested, thereby preventing
you from maxing out any skill too early. Just be careful with how you spend
your skill points - you can reverse your last three points, but after that,
it's permanent, unless you feel like enabling cheats or using some other
methods that could get you labeled a cheater when you go online.
Besides the whole leveling portion of these games, where you
take your character and truly make it unique, there is the issue of just what
character you decide to play. Torchlight 2 features 4 different classes, which
puts it a bit lower than Diablo 2 with 7, but still more than either the
original Diablo or Torchlight, with 3 each. You get to choose from Berserker,
Embermage, Outlander, or Engineer. Personally, I went with the Engineer,
because they seem to be a bit more of a jack-of-all-trades character, with a
skill group focusing on two handed melee, two handed ranged and summons, and a
tank centric skill group. The Outlander is really a ranged class, but has
skills that could be grouped by various types of damage, such as poison or
shadow, summons, crowd control abilities, or options to just increase your
basic weapon damage. The Embermage is pretty much what you'd expect, with
skills falling into either fire, ice, or electric, and typical attributes, like
snares in the ice group. The Berserker is more of a melee dps than a warrior,
and seems apt to using two claw weapons. Basically, there are still plenty of
choices when it comes to all the different ways you can approach the game.
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| You can customize your character too. In this case, I made a female Embermage who is shooting fireballs out of her hands. Also, skill group things. |
The last hallmark of these types of games is the grind. In
essence, they are nothing more than endless kill fests where you occasionally
take on some larger than life boss with the hopes they will drop a new piece of
loot of the really cool rarity colored name, which usually needs to be
indentified by someone special or through the use of an item, which you then
hope you can actually use. It is, if you step back and look at it, the epitome
of a time sink where no new content is ever really provided, as the devs
instead rely on some fundamental nature to ever improve your character, running
endless "Nightmare Mode Final Boss Runs" all with the hope of getting
that next set piece. If you've ever made it to the end game of an MMO, this is
exactly the same thing, except you can do it without the hassle of finding
20-40 other people to set up a raid for some dragon's lair, though Torchlight 2
does bring online multiplayer to the series.
Torchlight 2 addresses the issue of grinding in some
interesting ways, though not all are ones I'd agree with. The first is the
fairly typical idea of simply replaying through the game once you beat it, in
this case starting a New Game +. When initially playing the game you'll top out
somewhere around level 50, so a NG+ is a nice way to increase your level
another 30+ times by going over the content again, and since all the maps
change when you do that, utilizing brand new layouts just as would be the case
as if two different people where playing, it keeps things a little fresher, and
the ability to redo quests for even better rewards is nice, though it is a
departure from simply upping the difficulty level like I remember doing in Diablo,
and in fact you cannot change your difficulty setting beyond what you initially
selected. I've also heard, but not dared to experience, that you can go through
multiple iterations of NG+, as once when I was researching what pieces of gear
I needed to flesh out a set I heard mention of someone on NG5+. The downside is
that a NG+ character cannot play with a non-NG+, eliminating people running
lower levels through the game. By far a better method for keeping this fresh is
through the use of the mapworks, a section of the game you unlock upon beating
it initially. Here you can purchase various maps with themes reminiscent of
some portion of the game - ice cave, dragon lair, dark tower - that come with
special bonuses and penalties. For example, you may purchase a map to access
some engineering platforms over a pit of lava (such as those found in Act 3 of
the game), which are filled with spiders and goblins (from Act 1), embellished
with changes such as increased player damage, better odds to find rare items,
or drastically more powerful enemies. Personally, this is my preferred method
from leveling up later in the game, but that's because I like bonuses that make
it easier to kill enemies or find better loot.
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| I don't know what Haunt is, but I don't like the idea of my enemies having a 100% chance to cast it. |
Gear is also a huge portion of these types of games, and
Torchlight 2 doesn't go in too drastic a direction with it, though it does make
some changes over its predecessor. As already stated, gear generally requires a
certain stat point allocation, or sometimes just a high enough level. Some gear
is limited to a specific class. It's not uncommon to find a very good piece
that is a part of a set, so you'll want to look for the matching pieces, either
by trading with people you know via the online mode, which does allow you to
take the same character you play by yourself online, through the use of a
special set vendor that you can uncover if you're very lucky, or by increasing
your magic find with special bonuses or using a good mapworks map. Then comes
gear improvement, which again is nothing major for the genre. One method is
through the use of gems and sockets, with gems of all rarities, levels, and
effects. The other is enchantments, which is much different than what I recall
from the first game, which allowed you to endlessly add enchantments for
greater cost, and with a greater risk that the enchanter would wipe the slate
clean (I had a lot of <10% failure chance enchants fail, so maybe that
change is a good thing). Instead, there are various enchanters in the game,
with things like different focuses, such as one that offer poison or fire
related enchantments or another that gives additional luck or gold find,
different limits on the number of enchantments they can add, and of course all
the good ones have a random chance of appearing somewhere out in the world, so
you can't just expect to always have access to the guy that can put four enchants
on your items.
Up to this point, if you've ever played an ARPG before, you
probably haven't seen anything that's too drastically different from something
else you've experienced, except for maybe my mention of the mapworks or the way
enchantments work. I'd say generally that Torchlight doesn't go in a brave new direction,
but it certainly adds some nice features. One is the way you can handle
inventory in this game. First, every item takes up a single space, so there is
no need to try and sort things around the huge 3x2 mace you have in your
inventory, like you needed to in Diablo 2. Furthermore, when it comes to your
stash, which is your personal bank, you'll find that there are two places you
can store things in town. The first is your personal stash. The second is a
shared stash, which allows you to transfer items with ease between any of your
characters, though there is a difference between regular and hardcore mode
characters, since this game also has that. Further making item management easy
is the pet, which returns from Torchlight. Every character gets a pet, which
comes with a whole system where you can feed him fish you find by fishing to
alter his behavior, or equip him with items to increase damage, and besides
acting as a secondary damage source you can also transfer items out of your
pack, into your pet's, and then dispatch your pet to town to sell all that
garbage, which in itself is one of the greatest features ever implemented in an
ARPG, since, you know, making gold by selling stuff is good, and constantly
warping back to town is not. Additionally, both you and your pet have four
spell slots, which allow you to learn spells that range from passive ones that
increase your damage or experience gain, to summons that bring in blood zombies
that scale with your level or skeleton archers, to more direct spells like self
or group heals. I found a group heal on my pet to be a nice addition, which,
when combine with my Engineer's heal bot pretty much always kept me alive. The
last special thing about Torchlight 2 is the charge function, which is a bar on
the bottom center of your screen that fills as you do damage. The result is
different for each class, such as the Engineer that has five individual charges
that alter what a skill does or increases the damage produced, or the
Embermage's which only activates when full and allows a period of time where
spells are cast without using any mana and deal extra damage.
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| I do like the Berseker's charge ability, which builds up to deal massive damage in the form of critical hits. |
Where Torchlight 2 really exceeds though is that it's just
plain fun. I had a good time leveling up, playing through the story and
experiencing the variety of beautiful environments the game had to offer, even
if the story itself was nothing special. While I almost exclusively played an
Engineer, I did dabble with the Outlander, and felt that it, as would be all
the other classes, would be a good experience. Things like large flashy spells,
a variety of enemies from giant mushroom things to skeleton torsos that crawl
after you, a world that's full of secrets, and a graphics system that, while
cartoony, works perfectly with just how seriously the game doesn't take itself,
all made the game more enjoyable than your typical dreary adventure game. Also,
the soundtrack is great, which I'm listening too as I write this, since it
was/is available for free.
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| As you explore, you might find special phase beasts, which, when killed, open a portal to a special zone that will provide an opportunity to gain riches. Unfortunately, this one includes the Crab King, who fears hot butter. I like this game's humor. |
Currently, I've logged 52 hours in Torchlight 2, though I
was sitting at about 24 on my Engineer when I beat the game the first time. The
rest of that is playing other characters, trying out some online, doing a bit
of NG+, and running the mapworks while looking for better gear, because, you
know, I really want that one epic item that completes my otherwise 2/3 set.
There are issues I take with the game, most notably the inability to fully
respec your talents, but I'm sure that's something that will quickly be added
to the game once the mod tools are released (there is actually an achievement
for playing with 10 mods active at once). Still, I would highly recommend this
game, both to those who have a long tradition of playing ARPGs, and those who
have never tried one before. To motivate you along, I'll point out that the
game does have a free demo. As far as cost, I managed to get it for $7.50 in a
trade deal when I picked up a 4 pack, while the best price it's been
individually is $10. Normally it's $20, and that's probably about right for
this type of game, but I can see getting it at $15 and not feeling like I
ripped anyone off for the great experience I ended up getting out of it - 9 out
of 10.
So, the final breakdown:
Score: 9/10
Suggested Price: $15+
