Designers:  Runic Games

Platform: PC

Release Date:  September 20, 2012

Genre: Action Role-playing Game

Game Modes:  Single-Player Campaign & Multi-player Co-op (6 players)

Cost:  $19.99

Reviewed by:  Anthony Du Lac

I’m not sure what it exactly says about me, as a writer and reviewer of stuff, that I so frequently use relationship analogies in my articles, but it’s an analogical device that’s often appropriate.   My romance with Torchlight 2, for example, is well-suited to this sort of flowery vernacular for a variety of reasons.  It was more than a simple fling but not quite a long-term partnership, either.  It featured all the excitement and enjoyment of a really great first date, the one where you suddenly realize, “Hey, we’re really hitting it off!”

For those not “in the know,” the original Torchlight (by Runic Games) was a surprise hit in the action-RPG genre that revealed that Blizzard actually weren’t the only ones who knew how to craft an Action RPG.  Since Runic Games features some key members from previous Diablo design teams, it’s probably unsurprising that they understand the genre so well.  Despite very positive reviews for the original Torchlight, it wasn’t entirely without flaws and Runic was determined to address most of those with the sequel.  Torchlight 2 does, in fact, improve many weaker areas of the original game while managing to carve out its own unique successes.

Let’s start by pulling the curtain back a bit on Torchlight 2’s (very) few fumbles.  The primary complaint I had was that the storyline was underwhelming and often seemed somewhat schizophrenic or even rudderless.  It basically revolves around stopping the Alchemist from the previous game who has been corrupted by ember blight from the Heart of Odrak and now seeks to do bad, bad things.  As a brief aside, it seems to me that many of the issues facing the frequently imperiled fantasy worlds in this genre stem from a simple lack of ethics or moral fiber.  Had any of these world-threatening villains ever attended Vacation Bible School, for example, a lot of drama might have been averted.  

The Robot who could not love.

Leaving aside the moral failings of the game’s villain, the story simply does little to ever truly invest players in any of the quests or the larger picture, yet despite that issue, it doesn’t much detract from the overall experience.  A comparison between Torchlight 2 and its 900 lb. gorilla of a competitor, Diablo 3, is inevitable but nowhere is the disparity in design resources more noticeable than in the cut-scenes and voice-acting.  Torchlight 2 uses a simplistic yet stylized cartoon medium to deliver cut-scenes and while effective, it’s still more functional than “fancy”, whereas Diablo 3’s cut-scenes are stunningly high-quality and extremely cinematic.  

Coming from Diablo 3’s extremely impressive voice-acting and music down to Torchlight 2’s much more meager offerings is also somewhat disappointing, but again, you’ll not find yourself noticing it THAT much once you dig into Torchlight 2’s superb gameplay.  You’d be forgiven for assuming that since the voice-acting and video cut-scenes in Torchlight 2 take second fiddle to Diablo’s far superior offerings, that Torchlight 2’s graphics must fall badly short as well – but that assumption would be utterly wrong. 

"Isn't this overkill?  Nah, it's just enough "kill."

While Diablo 3’s in-game graphics are, indeed, sumptuous, beautiful, and appropriately dark and gloomy (rainbow haters will be pleased¹), Torchlight 2 heads in a more stylized, colorful, and (again) “cartoony” style that works extremely well (rainbow haters will howl in fury¹).  For every instance in Diablo 3 where I found myself admiring the scenery, I had an equally pleasant experience with Torchlight 2’s interesting environments and special effects.  But gamers don’t always play games to have their eyeballs tickled and when it comes down to the core clicking-gameplay action, Torchlight 2 delivers with extreme prejudice.

There won’t be anything terribly unfamiliar about T2’s gameplay to diehard fans of the series but there have been some welcome additions and tweaks to the series.  Overland environments are more interesting with the addition of day/night cycles and weather effects (used to great effect in one mini-quest path during the 3^rd Act), while character personalization options have increased to include sex, face, hair type, and hair color.  The fishing mini-game and pet usage are still available and just as spiffy as ever (new rare magic items or spells can actually speed up your Pet’s shopping and selling trips into town by quite a bit) and the UI has been enhanced to improve convenience and functionality.

Frankly, I prefer Barbara Eden...

Players can select one of four all-new classes to play and despite leaving the familiar old roles behind, they’ll find that these new ones are every bit as useful and enjoyable to play. The Engineer is a master of ember-powered steampunk contraptions and a potent melee fighter and seems best-suited for solo players.  Meanwhile, the Outlander is a nomadic ranged fighter who appears to benefit the most from his pet’s assistance.  If you like dual-wielding pistols or blasting away with a shotgunne (Torchlight 2’s spelling, not mine), this is the class for you.  The Berserker might sound like he should be a beast of a fighter but he’s mostly focused around faster attacks and animal-themed powers.  Finally, the Embermage is your somewhat prototypical spell-blasting magic-user specializing in elemental-themed magical attacks.
 

I chose to play as a shotgunne-wielding Outlander who was heavily assisted by his trusty lupine pet.  Despite the fact that the Outlander is supposed to be a low-level magic-user, I found his magical “Glaive” special attack to be extremely potent and eminently useful.  Since I prefer NOT to read about the best “builds” and instead like discovering things for myself, I ended up not fully realizing just how powerful several other skills/powers were and only added points to some of them much later in the game.  
I played through Torchlight 2 on Normal difficulty but despite the label, I found large portions of the game rather difficult without very astute micro-management of my character’s abilities and some clever tactical decisions.  In short – I died a lot.  But if you’d already used a Town Portal scroll, it wasn’t too annoying to return to the scene of your failure in short order.  The game does offer several sizes of refreshing Mana and Health potions and there are also spells you can find during the game which can also boost hit points, armor, or defense for further support.

I was quite impressed with the variety of boss types in the game. For example, many mid-level foes even proved difficult sometimes without solid preparation.  I also enjoyed the Torchlight 2 dungeons more than in Diablo 3, as they felt more focused in both theme and challenge.

NPCs everywhere offer a large variety of quests to keep your inner “paladin” constantly busy fighting evil here, recovering lost loot there, and just generally playing the role of a do-gooder as you see fit.  Unfortunately, most quest decisions or storyline options seemed fairly cut-and-dried.  Your actions consistently supported the cause of all that was good and just, with little in the way of moral ambiguity to muddy the waters.  Real life, of course, is rarely so black or white and had the player faced more challenging decisions, it might have ramped up the emotional and psychological resonance of the storylines.

The single-player campaign was broken down into three unique Acts that each had their own interesting style and flavor.  Act I, entitled Wake of the Alchemist, has you trying to catch up to the Alchemist and undo several disasters of his making, all framed by the Etherian Steppes environment which features a Northern climate of pine trees, snow, and mountainous regions with a generous helping of mammalian-based enemies and a wide variety of spiders.  Did I mention that there was a LOT of spiders?  Arachnophobes need not apply.  

Act II was set in the heat-blasted Desert environment of the Mana Wastes, where you’ll run into a lion’s share of skeletons and flying foes, primarily. 

The final Act 3 is set in the deep wooded, rainy region of Grunnheim, which features the tree-entwined ruins of an ancient Dwarven civilization and lots of ghosts and other spooktacular enemies, along with a variety of steampunk-powered foes (robots and the like). 

And this little puppy even glows in the dark!  The Axe that is...

Interestingly, if you leave an area and return, after clearing out all the zone enemies, you’ll still find yourself facing an empty zone.  This differs from classic Diablo 2 where if you left a zone and later returned, you’d find a newly populated zone.  Ostensibly, this is because the game seems tightly balanced where leveling is concerned and strictly prefers to govern exactly at what level you face certain areas and baddies.  A nifty aspect of the campaign world is that there are some special “named” dungeons that only randomly appear in any given play-through.  You may beat the entire game but never see most of them.  While some may find that a bit off-putting, I found that it gave me impetus to try another campaign run in order to hopefully discover one of these extra special dungeons.  

The only one I discovered was the special Minecraft homage entitled “Notch’s Mine” which actually featured a few of that game’s classic “creeper” enemies, textured in a 8-bit pixelated graphic design. 

What a blockhead!

Disappointingly, it was an incredibly easy mini-dungeon to defeat though it netted me one of four swords to be found from this particular special dungeon-romp.  I nabbed the Iron Sword, which also has the appearance of an old 8-bit sword (see pic below to truly appreciate this clever artistic homage), that gave my pet increased armor, damage, speed, and a much faster town travel time.  It also dealt out some solid damage and was super quick.  Truly a uniquely enjoyable weapon!

8-bits of pure, unadulterated fury (note the funky hat, too)

Therein lies Torchlight 2’s best strength compared to Diablo 3 – it features a much more generous yet balanced loot experience.  Where, in Diablo 3, I was constantly disappointed at the fairly mundane low-level magic items I was finding, in Torchlight 2 I was always getting really cool stuff!  I’m admittedly someone who enjoys the constant item comparisons and swapping in that slightly better item to make my character just that tiny little bit better than he was before.  What’s that, you say?  That “Sword of Eyeball Implosions” will buff my health by +100 compared to my current sword but doesn’t do as much damage?  Hmmm…swap ‘em out!  I love that stuff but Diablo’s drops always felt so chintzy and grudgingly doled out that I lost interest in the results of my combat, finding myself driven forward solely in the desire to see more of the story and amazing cut-scene movies.  In Torchlight 2, I was always on the lookout for that wicked piece of gear which might complete one of the many great item sets in the game and always finding other neat stuff, too.  It’s no secret that the loot system is a huge driving force in action-RPGs and Torchlight 2 actually scoops D3 in how it handles that whole carrot-stick thing. That being said, having finished the game twice now, I was disappointed at how stupidly difficult it was to get a Legendary, which in this particular game is truly uber-rare. Considering that not long after Torchlight 2 released, Diablo 3 saw many improvement and balance tweaks, including upping the ability to find desired Legendaries, this has become a failing of Torchlight 2's.

Another area where Torchlight 2 could've used improvement, compared to its bigger, more notorious ARPG brother, was how Torchlight 2 provided feedback and info on the foes you'll face.  Where Diablo 3 had the enjoyable little sound clips of history or info on various monsters, Torchlight 2 had nothing.  Without some sort of small encyclopedic entry about each enemy, players lose an opportunity to use better strategies in facing them.  Tiny status effect messages (and I mean tiny!) appear at the top above the creature's name and health-bar but just as quickly flicked off, leaving players utterly in the dark as to what effects impacted the monster and whether that effect was helpful or not.

Choices, choices...do I go with the Uncommon outfit or this snazzy Rarer ensemble?

Torchlight 2 offers magical enhancements for your items in the form of various gems that you can place into items the feature open slots.  You can also find “enhancers” who roam various map areas – some harder to discover than others – who will gladly, for a price, add magical abilities to your pre-existing items.  At your Imperial base camp, you’ll have NPCs who offer the ability to salvage already socketed gems from items (via destroying the containing magic item) OR to destroy a socketed gem thus freeing up a slot again, respectively.  One other neat twist is the availability of spell scrolls that can be used in addition to your normally granted extra abilities via a few built-in spell slots.  Even your friendly pet can be equipped with spells which it will then auto-cast at the appropriate time.  For example, my Wolf pet “Greymane” would insta-cast a Blood Zombie summoning spell at the beginning of combat, thus granting him his own little decaying pet!  

Since the newly added co-op gameplay was one of the most requested new features, I was excited to give it a spin and I was not disappointed.  It was a seamless experience with loot drops showing only for your own character, thus no bickering over the goodies.  And while I was a fairly high-level Outlander playing with my friend’s much lower-leveled character, I didn’t feel as if I was badly ruining the balance.  Granted that may have been because I was fairly cautious in how much I helped him, but it was nice to be able to play together despite the level disparities.  The game can support up to 6-player Co-op but unfortunately I didn’t get the opportunity to experience that, so I can’t speak for how well it works.  Based on my experience with our 2-member party, though, I imagine it works just fine.

Runic has added several patches to the game since launch, enhancing what was already a fairly bug-free initial experience.  They’ve finally released the GUTS editor for wanna-be modders and have added STEAM’s Workshop functionality to Torchlight 2 as well, rounding out what is an already excellent package with even more options to extend the game’s life beyond just the single-player campaign experience.   If the modding tools aren’t intriguing, there’s always the NewGame+ mode (or “N+”) to offer a truly challenging re-match with the game’s campaign – monsters are tougher and more plentiful and the difficulty levels are ramped up to match your high-level character’s potential capabilities during a second play-through. 

For players not as interested in a second campaign experience, there’s always the option to buy one of many challenge maps from a map vendor, who only appears after you’ve completely beaten the main campaign.  These maps offer intriguing and unique challenges, some with a strange mix of variables, to a standard dungeon romp.  On one map you may see rewards of three times the normal amount of Gold but also facing commensurately more wicked monsters while another map may offer a higher percentage of magical item drops but have a super tough boss at the end.  Yet another map may limit the amount of health you can heal during the dungeon or feature hit-point draining environmental challenges.  The more challenging or lucrative the map, the more it will cost, though, so save your Gold, adventurers!  

While some reviewers may be content to give Torchlight 2 a score in the high 80’s (out of 100) or what we’d know in the USA as a “B+” grade, I find myself considering it a very solid “A” or 92 out of 100.  Why would I score it so highly and above that of the average score?  Because it’s not only a high-quality product in most aspects (cutscenes, voice-work, and storyline aside) but it’s also incredibly fun with many extra features - including some we don’t see as often these days (LAN play, good Co-op modes) – AND it’s insanely inexpensive at a mere $19.99.  In my book, that qualifies it as the best gaming value of the year, all things considered.  If you’re a big fan of the Action-RPG genre, you’ll love every minute of Torchlight 2 and even if you’re not an Action-RPG fan, specifically, you’ll still find a ton of fun packed into this wonderful game.  Torchlight 2 is simply one of the sure-fire, can’t miss games of this past year.  What are you waiting for?  Get clicking!  Loot man, loot!

FINAL SCORE:    92% 

(Special thanks to Runic Games for the review copies of Torchlight 2)