While I’ve never been a fan of the Diablo franchise, I was a
great fan of the previous Torchlight, so I was really looking forward to grab
the new Torchlight 2.
With some friends we
grabbed a 4-pack as soon as it hit the Steam store and got down to business.
Back to Torchlight… now with Multiplayer
One of the things we most repeated while
playing Torchlight 1 was – “this game is so frigging awesome, pity it doesn’t
have multiplayer…” – Well, now that suffering has come to an end. Torchlight 2
does feature multiplayer, and does it well. My first multiplayer game was a 7
hour marathon with very fast response and no lag whatsoever. This was one of the critical points to me, as
the battle speed in Torchlight is frenetic.
My first choice to delve back to the dungeons
was an Outlander. The ranged, was my first class in Torchlight and I recall I
loved the ricochet shot mechanic. So I tuned up a bit my visuals, got my pet (a
ferret) ready, and dropped to the lobby where my two friends were waiting. Just
then I noticed one of my friends had grabbed an Outlander too. So we ended with
two Outlanders and a Berserk in the group.
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| My second character, a sturdy Engineer girl, with a fellow Outlander friend. |
Character Customization
The first thing I loved in this game is the
great amount of customization of the characters, either via items or skills.
Despite we were having two outlanders in the group, we were different like
night and day.
Skills are grouped in skill trees but they have
no previous requirements aside from level, so you can freely pick the best of
each world to fit into your play style. Never we had to worry about a skill
being mandatory to progress and through the 25 levels we upped, only 2 skills
we shared: the starting burst shot, and some bat invocation shot.
My friend decided to max his dual pistols and
his passives abilities, thus choosing range and damage output as his primary
focus. He is not fond of the keyboard so he limited himself to two maxed
spammable skills. His pet was a bulldog, his armor, looked like a barbarian archer
of sorts.
I, on the other side, love having lots of
skills, so I soon found myself cross-building between the different skill trees
for a lot of variety. Some Ricochet shots, and glaive throwing abilities, made
me less dependent on the weapon, so I kept going from bows to pistols to
shotguns as items got better. I paired the damage with utility skills that
allowed me to back-flip out of combat and debuff enemies, so in the end I made
myself a not so powerful, but far more versatile skillset. My tunic-like armor
finished the picture for a complete different character played on the same
Class.
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| My Outlander and his pet - as you can see, nothing to do with my friend´s Outlander. |
Difficulty and leveling
One of the things I have to praise Runic for is
the way enemies adapt to the parties. While you usually drift through lone
monsters meant to be just “time-killers” to be munched upon, they are tough
enough to justify using skills instead of auto-attacks, yet weak enough to not
suppose a real threat.
When you get to the ambush points or mid-bosses
you will face quite a challenge though. While they are not impossibly strong,
the enemies can hold their ground and pack some punch. You will have to manage
your resources well if you don’t want to be re-spawning at the nearest city.
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| Even alone you can charge into the horde and obliterate them without mercy. |
Even if you stray away from the group, neither
you nor your friends will be obliterated as the mobs seem to adapt to the
number of present teammates, thus you will always face a decent challenge so
the game doesn’t get too easy or too hard.
Leveling is also done at a steady pace, and it
never took more than 10 minutes to reach the next level. This is one of the
things that keeps me grabbed to the game: As the skill points flow you have always your
eye in the next best thing you can buy from those tempting skill trees.
Explorable Areas
The first impression on the game areas was
really nice, the overworld is big and vast, with lots to explore, and if I am
to judge by my friends in-game comments it is randomly generated because it
didn’t match their previous gameplays.
One of my previous concerns about the original
Torchlight was that the dungeons got repetitive due to few environment
variations as you delved deeper.
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| Dungeons are still there and have a lot more detail now. |
In Torchlight 2 you don’t get that boring
feeling due to the dungeons being randomly fit on the overworld. This keeps you
constantly switching from open surface environments (with their day/night
cycles), to the tight passageways of dungeons sprawled across the land.
Loot, portals and the meaning of live.
Torchlight loot is evenly distributed between
the players, who don’t see what is dropping for fellow players. This is good
because you usually don’t worry nor rage about what other’s drops are, and
instead you keep chatting alive with news of notable items that might be
interesting to others - or keep in secret items you are too greedy to share.
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| You can have the weapon but the pokémon is mine!! |
Portal waypoints in multiplayer are pretty
cool, as each player can keep an active portal, which any player can use as a
destination in his travels. To add on that, you can always teleport to your
friend’s location from a portal waypoint so even if you die in the middle of a
boss fight, you can re-spawn at the city for no cost and then portal your way
to the fight in less than a minute (I talk from personal experience on this
one).
This means death is almost a zero penalty issue
in multiplayer as you will never lose anything from dying as long as your
friends keeps themselves alive.
PvP
We’re not much into PvP but once we came back
to town from our long dungeoneering we tried some for fun. I really doubt the
game is meant to be balanced for PvP, as even at the same level, the ability of
the Berserk to wipe Outlanders was out of question.
As long as you stay at the city you can die
without worries or penalties so turning the cities into a battlefield is fun
from time to time.
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| An example of badass enemies and cool environments. |
Closing Comments
I am really
glad I got Torchlight 2 and certainly is worth every one of the 15 bucks I paid
for it. While the first Torchlight kinda got old with the time I’m sure I will
be playing this one a lot for the next months, especially as soon as mods start
being released.
Overall I
highly recommend it. I will not compare
it to Diablo as I never played any of them, but for my hack and slash needs it
has totally lived up to my expectations.
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