Torchlight 2

Oh Torchlight 2, how I wish I had never picked you up. No sooner had 2013 begun, and I resolved to be more prompt in my reviews, than did I dive into your embrace, leveling an Engineer well beyond that which was required to simply beat the game once, my usual point for finishing any digital experience, instead opting to play over and over again, all in a search for higher levels, new gear, unlocking even more powerful abilities, and yes, I am ashamed to admit, complete achievements. What cruel temptations you offer, to prey on a man's child like desire for big shiny spells, endlessly smashing enemies, and ever better loot. Easily overcoming my feeble objections, you stole nearly a month from my life, and while I might feign protest, we both know I wouldn't trade our short embrace for anything else...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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+