Torchlight 2

So, I bought the first Torchlight a while back on a steam sale, and shockingly they were able to make a multiplayer sequel to it before I could get around to playing it. So I just started Torchlight 2 with little to no knowledge of what happened in the first game.

Torchlight 2 is a multiplayer Diablo-style RPG. It has a steam punk, and more cartoony feel than Diablo does, which I think is quite awesome. Your character choices are Embermage, Berserker, Engineer, or Outlander.

The story, as far as I understood it, is that some bad guy is going after some steam punk energy source, and we need to stop him. As far as story goes in these games, it's good enough to bind things together, and picking up new items and new abilities will be carrying my attention through till the end.

The controls of the game are simply point and click, with some keyboard hotkeys to trigger your abilities. I kept most of my abilities to the numbers 1-4, and switched my hotkey for using the best potions from Z and X to Q and W, so my hand could spam those without having to traverse too much of the keyboard.

The graphics are very unique, and I loved what they did. Reading the items and traversing the UI took a while for me to get used to. It really seemed overly busy, but after a while you get the hang of it, and see why they did it that way.

The sound affects were awesome, and the voice acting was pretty good. Nothing amazing in the voice acting, but non-painful is what I grade by. I would like to compliment Torchlight 2 on balancing the VFX sounds versus the other audio. In Diablo III, I had to set the VFX to about 5% or my barbarian cleaving enemies was enough to wake the neighbors, while the dialog was being whispered.

For my first playthrough I picked Engineer. I went with tanky and AOE skills, which worked out really well. The typical fight was just me running into a mob of enemies, stomping, throwing spider mines, stomping, then running away while they all burned to death. It was beautiful.

I'd recommend playing on normal difficulty until you get the feel for things. Ironically, setting the difficulty harder does not give you better loot, faster XP, or anything like that; it's just harder. And it gets much harder at each difficulty level. The trick is that if you're playing any difficulty higher than normal, you need to stack armor reducing equipment so that you can actually do damage.

The only negative thing I had to say about this game is that the loading screens take forever. Or at least seem to, when I really want to get back into the action. The other nit-picky thing I had is that I would like to be able to respec my character completely, without rolling a new one. Yes, I know you can use respec potions, and yes I know you can use the console for this, but I would like a real in-game legit way of doing this.

To quickly go into the things they did absolutely right in this game. They have a crafting vendor that you can use to re-roll jewels, add sockets to items, trade unique items for a chance at a unique item you care about, allow trading in other set items for the chance of getting a set piece you care about. These are incredibly brilliant. I knew I was keeping all that crap in my inventory and shared stash. After looking up the recipes online, my stash was almost empty, except for the awesome pieces I decided to keep for my alts or for a set I'm excited to get closer to completing. The other stuff they did right was being able to dump inventory onto your pet and send it to town to sell and come back, and also pick up some potions, dynamite, and scrolls of identify and town portal. Hells yes.


Overall it was a very enjoyable game that I could play solo or group up with friends. I would highly recommend picking this game up. It took me around 20 hours to beat the game, but as I've said before, I'm a completionist. So I had to spend 3 of those hours hunting down the last few quests, and assembling the robot. Future plans for the game are getting into modding, or rolling another character with all of my epic off sets.