Then there's my other favourite, the Wolf Shade. It means that to get healthier, you have to get deeper into the fight. The more you swoop through, the bigger the life boost you gain. But more importantly, you're also draining health from them. It's smart - it causes you to dash forward, transformed into a spectral wolf for about half a second, rushing through enemies and hurting them as you go. So for me, Shadow Burst - the first skill available on the Shadow page - is essential. You makes your choices, and your play style comes with it. So realistically you're not going to use most of them, if you want any of them to be well powered. The skill trees are very interesting - three pages with ten skills each, but each with 15 stages to them. The class is superbly structured, the game constantly enticing me to string one fight into the next, not pausing but continuing my rage, going back for loot later. I played as a Beserker, and I'm thrilled with the choice. But it still feels like failure - bitter failure - when it happens.) And if you've made judicious use of portals, you can be back where you were in just a few seconds. If you want to return to the beginning of your current area, it'll cost you a tenth of your gold. And almost every time it's been my stupid fault. 115 times according to the game, in my first 20 hours. The challenge has been absolutely pitch perfect throughout, the dungeons exactly matching my level as I reach them, the battles always on the limit of what I can do. Normal is recommended for players new to Torchlight, and I can assure you that Vet is the one to pick for the familiar. If you want to start on Veteran or Nightmare, you can. There are no limits on difficulty levels here. While it would be sheer madness to suggest this - or any other game in the genre - isn't repetitive, the locations vary enormously, even within themselves, and the enemy mix demands a fierce focus on your skills to stay alive. Vibrant, gorgeous scenes, bursting with character, an amazing variety of enemies, lovely features to discover, and packed with secrets and extras.
But like almost every aspect of the game, they're fantastically well realised. Deserts, forests, ruins, etc - it's exactly what you'd expect to see. Like almost every aspect of the game, there's nothing strikingly original about the locations. Instead there's a far more traditional setup for a Diablo-clone: one town per act, multiple areas all around, portals linking them all together, and a bunch more story trying to justify the click-click-click. So gone is the single surface village and ever-descending dungeon. What it doesn't do, however, is move the genre forward in any meaningful direction. Torchlight 2 removes those limits, keeps the charm, and manages to be a vastly superior sequel to an already fantastic game. The lovely, minimalist approach to a dungeon crawler with its linear descent and ridiculous amount of charm managed to woo us despite its limits. Perhaps more importantly, Torchlight 2 is also much better than Torchlight. Saying that, Torchlight 2 is WAY better than Diablo III. But I am not willing to get into a pie-fight between Torchlight 2 and Diablo III.
We can say which is our most favourite, of course, and we do. There's a reason we don't put scores at the end of reviews, and it's because games shouldn't be ranked on some giant graph - it's stupid and arbitrary. We'll definitely take a look at the co-op soon. Which I believe makes me ready to tell you Wot I Think.Įdit: Sorry, I completely forgot to stress that I was playing this single-player, as it was pre-launch. I've played Torchlight 2 for 20 hours, killed 8339 monsters (1352 of them exploded), gathered 179,463 gold pieces, died 115 times, and completely pointlessly smashed 1,368 bits of scenery.