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Torchlight II
PC (Steam)
Click, Click, Click
3/5 stars
“Torchlight 2” is the sequel to 2009’s “Torchlight,” a “Diablo” clone by Indie developer, Runic Games, which counts two co-founders of Blizzard (the company behind “Diablo”) among its ranks. As such, the ‘Torchlight’ series of games receives a lot of praise from “Diablo” fans. I’m not a “Diablo” fan. I disliked the first game and never bothered with the second, which is the one that drives fans into a quasi-religious fervor thanks to the revolutionary-in-2001 addition of online co-op multi-player. But thanks to the Indie pricing attached to “Torchlight 2” and a group of 4 friends seeking an online multi-player experience, I found myself with a second chance to experience the groundbreaking gameplay that defined the Hack ‘n Slash subgenre of RPGs. After my recent experience with the local multi-player in “Dungeon Hunter: Alliance,” I was curious to see if Runic could successfully improve upon that mediocre formula in any meaningful way.
Presentation
“Torchlight 2” is a nice looking game. The fully-polygonal game engine isn’t afraid to use bright colors and vibrant textures. Character designs are distinctively cartoony as well, though enemy designs usually stray far too close to the generic. As a result, the game world has a lot of visual character, but just doesn’t feel very interesting. It’s also noteworthy that the game engine isn’t very resource intensive, and could be run on an anemic PC if a gaming rig wasn’t available. Of course, on a gaming rig, the game runs quite smoothly, features short load times, and never skips a frame when huge mobs of enemies swarm on-screen. Of course, fancy graphics would be largely wasted, as the game uses a traditional top-down camera that is situated so far away from the action that fine details are completely lost.
Outside of the game engine, there are a few cutscenes that take place at the beginning of each of the game’s three chapters and at the end of the game. These are 2D cartoons that look more like Flash animation than anything in the actual game. They look sharp and smooth, but are otherwise un-noteworthy.
Audio wise, “Torchlight 2” is nothing special. The soundtrack is overly generic with little in the way of memorable music. There isn’t a lot of voiceacting to speak of either. While quest-giving characters are fully voiced, and the performances are adequate, they aren’t really anything special. The most noteworthy voicework in the game is actually the invisible narrator who doesn’t really say much of anything outside of announcing level-ups.
Technically, “Torchlight 2” is fairly solid… except in the online portion, which is the main draw of this sequel over its predecessor or any number of other Hack ‘n Slash games. While the game never crashed on any member of my group when playing offline single-player, it seemed to crash CONSTANTLY in online multi-player while doing something as innocent as shopping in town. And when it wasn’t crashing, it was desynchronizing all of the gameplay elements, so enemies would only attack one player and ignore everyone else, or one player would kill all the enemies in an area only to discover that the rest of the team was still fighting their own instances of those same enemies, or one player would open a treasure chest, which would produce nothing for another member of the group. While Runic released a series of patches for the game, they didn’t get around to the crashing-in-town bug (which was apparently a problem with merchants) until after we had finished playing (almost 4 months later!), and we had to use a nonsensical work-around to the desynch bug that involved never allowing the player who created the game to enter a new area first (which makes no sense, as the game doesn’t use a dedicating hosting engine for its online functionality, but is purely peer-to-peer). Instead, Runic decided to issue 200MB+ patches that did nothing but add language support for Russian and an handful of other obscure languages… Talk about misplaced priorities!
Story
“Torchlight 2” doesn’t really have a very impressive story. Apparently, the Big Bad from the first “Torchlight” was able to corrupt one of the heroes of the original game: The Alchemist. Under the influence of corruption, the Alchemist has decided to open a portal to the Nether World in order to allow a race of Cthulhu-like tentacle monsters to invade the real world. In order to weaken the boundary between the worlds, the Alchemist must use the Big Bad’s heart to infest the world’s Guardian Beasts with Nether corruption. It falls upon a group of four new heroes to chase-down the Alchemist and put a stop to his plans.
The world of ‘Torchlight’ also features a variety of unique races and technologies. Unfortunately, none of this world-building lore is detailed within the game’s narrative. I was left constantly wondering why little raccoon-men were enchanting my loot and why strange-looking robot-men were living in the desert and jumping out of the sand dunes to attack me. This lack of lore stands in stark contrast to games like “The Elder Scrolls” that shove world-building lore down the player’s throat in horse-choking quantities via entirely-optional in-game books. “Torchlight 2” doesn’t feature any kind of in-game encyclopedia, leaving the entire thing as one big question mark.
While the narrative is straight forward and follows a sensible progression, I never felt that the game’s story was anything more than a dull series of quests given by personality-free non-player characters. I can’t recall the names of anyone who played a role in the story nor any of the game world’s unique races. While “Torchlight 2” didn’t provide the kind of narrative I like in an RPG, it at least avoided the horrible middle-school fan-fiction writing quality that plagued “Dungeon Hunter: Alliance,” so I guess that’s an improvement.
Gameplay
“Torchlight 2” is a typical Hack ‘n Slash. Characters go into dungeons, kill enemies, and find loot. Unlike local co-op Hack ‘n Slashes, though, it’s possible for players to get separated. Actually, getting separated is far too easy, as players can find themselves chasing stragglers from one enemy encounter in different directions, which then leads each of them into a new, different enemy encounter. Fortunately, experience and fame (which grants extra points to spend on skills) are shared within a large area around a battle, and the game generated unique loot for each player, allowing everyone to grab everything they find without feeling guilty about not sharing. Additionally, even while adventuring alone, the player's character isn't truly alone, as each character gets a pet companion creature from the start. Pets can be used to effectively double the character's carrying capacity, run errands back to town (selling crap items or buying potions and scrolls), and serve as meat shields in combat to draw enemies away from the character. While pets are incredibly tough in combat, they are also entirely AI controlled, so sometimes they can be ineffectually stupid.
Loot all has stat requirements, preventing newly-created characters from acquiring loot that is ‘too good’ for them and breaking the difficulty balance. Of course, “Torchlight 2” does have a couple of interesting twists on both stat requirements and difficulty. Ever piece of equipment has either a stat requirement or a level requirement, allowing lower-level characters with the right stat distribution to wear higher level armor. It’s also possible to play the game on a variety of difficulties, ranging from the cake-walk of 'Casual' up to the ball-breaking 'Elite.' My group played on 'Normal' and found the game to be fairly well-balanced up until the very end.
At the end of the game, it’s possible to either start a New Game+ (which I didn’t bother with) or to play a nearly-limitless number of random dungeons available from a map-seller. I played quite a few of these random maps and found the difficulty to be broken by one specific enemy: Dwarven Battle Turrets. These things can kill a properly-leveled character in a single volley of bullets, which they can conveniently start firing while still off-screen. Even worse is the fact that many map-dungeon bosses love to summon hordes of Dwarven Battle Turrets to help them out.
Most Hack ‘n Slash fans don’t play this sub-genre for its gripping narrative, but instead for character development and loot… okay, mainly just loot. Early on, I found “Torchlight 2” to be quite generous with high-quality equipment that improved my character’s abilities in a constant ‘loot treadmill.’ Toward the end of the game, however, I found that enemies rarely dropped anything useful, instead leaving behind piles of non-magical (white) loot and barely magical (green) loot, as the flow of rare (blue) loot and unique (yellow) loot ground to a halt. In the end-game, I found dungeon crawling to be only worthwhile for acquiring gold with which to buy blue and yellow loot from the merchants that appear in the game’s towns. Character development provides 5 stat points with each level and 1 skill point. Stat points can be spent on Strength (for physical damage), Dexterity (for accuracy and evasion), Focus (for magic damage), and Vitality (for health and defense). Each character has a large stable of skills, with some passives and some castable. I found passive abilities to be far more useful than castable spells, but each character has plenty of different options that ensure that no two character builds will be alike (until people share ‘God-Builds’ online and everyone else copies them).
Aside from standard merchants who sell weapons, armor, potions, and scrolls, each town also hosts a Gambler, who sells unidentified items of potentially great quality, an Enchanter who adds a completely random bonus ability to a piece of equipment, and a Transmuter who can combine certain items that are no longer of use into random new items. The randomness of the Gambler, Enchanter, and Transmuter really rubbed me the wrong way, as the randomness of finding good loot in the first place felt like enough of a gamble. Instead of reliable getting good or useful things from these merchants, I usually found myself burning through all my gold with little or no improvement. Any excuse to push players back out into the dungeons to grind for more gold, right?
Finally, one of the worst aspects of the game is its controls. Aside from a few keyboard shortcuts for special abilities and potions, everything in the game is done with the mouse. Want to move? Click the spot. Want to attack an enemy? Click it. This over-reliance on point-and-click leads combat in “Torchlight 2” in the direction of random chaos instead of strategy. Yes, it is possible to hold the Shift key to keep a character from moving if the player accidentally clicks on the ground near an enemy that just moved out from under the mouse cursor, but this seems like a contrived solution to a problem that would have been more sensibly fixed by making WASD or Arrow key movement instead of mouse movement an option. The chaos of battle gets even more confusing with multiple players all dropping flashy area-of-effect spells… it got to the point where I frequently lost track of my cursor (which is unnecessarily tiny in the first place). Ideally, “Torchlight 2” should have supported the Xbox 360 controller (like “Torchlight,” which was later ported to the Xbox 360). I was able to make do with an Xpadder profile that gave me access to all of the necessary keys without a keyboard, but the entire time I was thinking how much more fun combat would be if the game used a twin-stick movement/aiming setup like “Dungeon Hunter: Alliance.”
Overall
“Torchlight 2” is a solid Hack ‘n Slash. Of course, as a Hack ‘n Slash, the entire game just boils down to grinding for experience, gold, and the glory of loot. For people who like this kind of gameplay and enjoy click, click, clicking everything, “Torchlight 2” is well worth the $20 or less (depending on Steam sales). If Runic polishes the online portion, the game might even reach up to touch the sacred boots of “Diablo 2.” However, for people who actually want a story and engaging combat in an RPG, “Torchlight 2” doesn’t quite cut it. It’s pretty good for what it is, but what it is just isn’t very interesting.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 2/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3/5
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