Since playing the first Torchlight I’ve wanted to play the second one. However, every time I fire up the game I suddenly have zero interest. This game has been haunting me since 2020 sitting in my downloaded yet almost zero time played. Month after month I pushed it to the back to the list for years.
Finally, after these many years, I told myself I’ve had enough. I find it rather funny that it’s a single game that has caused me massive roadblocks like this. I eat games like this for breakfast and take a nap. Not this one. It’s been 3 years since my Torchlight I review.
I guess I just wanted to keep the fun memories I had of Torchlight 1 and the game as they were. I also just did not want an exact repeat of Torchlight. Which is kind of what I thought I would get. If I would have played long enough I would have seen Torchlight II while it has a lot of similarities the world is far more diverse to explore.
Now I love dungeons. Like really love dungeons in a video games. That is why I loved Torchlight so much. It was for a large part you just going deeper and deeper and deeper down a giant dungeon. At least that is what I recall after so many years of playing it.
Torchlight II is not that. You have outdoor zones you get to explore that usually have a few dungeons in them each. You don’t have a single town the game is focused around. Instead, each of the four acts has its town from what I can tell so far.
With this being a bit of an older game you are not getting a lot of character customization. That is also just something I’ve come to expect from Torchlight in general. Other than hair color, hair, and face (body) changes. You got a couple of options and that is it.
The game does give you a choice of four different classes: Embermage, Berserker, Engineer, and Outlander. I went with the berserker as I wanted something with melee that looks like I could melt the face off my foes. I’m not quite sure it has lived up to my expectation of it.
This game has just some strange cut-senses in it and I’m willing to admit I am not a fan of any of them so far. They are as strange looking as the storyline behind this game. While I’ve never been a big person for storylines I was looking to spam press Alt F4 anytime the game wanted to sell me about.
I was here for brainless hack-and-slash gameplay. Not some strange storyline about some Alchemist or wtf ever it was. I could have cared less. Tell me I’m fighting a giant pudding cup for all I care because it ran away with a silver magic spoon. Just anything but this game's storyline.
The game starts you off in what remains of some town you never get to see again. You then get to go off to warn yet another town that you will be doing some questing out of for a short amount of time. Along the way, you get to clear an outdoor zone and have some fun.
There are different tiers of creatures you end up facing. The color of their nameplate gives you some kind of indication of how much of a challenge you are about to face. I for one love little things like that just so I knew I can stop the button mashing for a second if I need to heal before leaping into possible death.
This game was then kind to rather quickly start feeding my addiction to dungeons. I found myself right at home in a wonderful Corrupted Crypt. I could have spent a month in there and felt right at home.
However, from the best I could tell zones don’t re-spawn based on time or anything like that. I noticed I could zone in and out of a few zones and they would not reset either. That was until I went off into a few further zones down the line. My best guess is they are not saving your progress in a zone per se just holding its memory.
Quite a cheap and dirty way to go about it. That however works for me if I want to rerun a zone or dungeon it won’t be that hard for me to force a reset if needed. I however noticed I could also repeat some quests I had already done. That is my kind of laziness.
Since I’ve played quite a few ARPGs up to this point I used my tried and tested tactic of just not killing everything. I wanted to not speed run things but move fast. That did not work out so great for me.
It seems instead of running around and smashing named creatures in the face and killing a few along the way to get some experience. They want you to at least kill every single creature. Otherwise, you start to fall far behind on levels. Till you hit a wall and can’t kill anything as it all just murders you before you can even do 10% damage to basic trash creatures.
Thankfully unless you pick hardcore getting killed is not that big of a deal. You get the option to pay way too much gold to re-spawn where you died, a smaller amount of gold to start back in the same zone, or zero gold to start back in that act town. Fair enough I feel.
Every time you level up you get 5 stat points and 1 skill point to spend. Rather expected in an ARPG. I rather like how they explain things in a way for you to understand the impact picking different stats has.
It is also important to note that items have stat minimums as well if you want to wear them in what I view as “early.” As they also have an option of just being a certain level before you can wear them without having the right stats as there is no class requirement.
This I felt was a nice touch. As I sometimes hate these kinds of gaming of needing to balance my stats based on not what I want to put them in. I instead have to put them into meeting gear check requirements.
As far as skills go you have three different trees if you could even call them that. They then are broken down into active and passive skills. Each kill even does an amazing job at giving you quite a lot of information about it as well.
I however feel so far that passive skills are just OP. I even have regrets at this point in putting so many points into the first skill I could call Eviscerate. It is nice I get a bit of arc damage. DoT (damage over time) component I’m starting to not care much for them unless I’m fighting a boss.
That is simply because I do a lot of critical damage. Most stuff as I’m clearing out zones and dungeons it’s dead the moment I land a critical or three on whatever creatures I’m smashing into the ground.
If I had just wasted spending points till later on. I might have gone for something like Stormclaw that causes chaining light damage around you. That sounds like fanatics as I run around murdering everything that moves.
While you can reset some skill points. it’s only the last three you spent and it’s a lot of gold. While it was tempting to just delete my character and start over again. I felt where is the challenge in that. I made some bad choices I am now stuck with them.
That is not the only place you can spend all that gold you end up getting either. Most of mine I’ve blown on enchanting my weapons hoping for even further damage. In the cities depending on the act, you are in they can either enchant an item once up to three times. Meanwhile, out in the wild if you find the enchant NPC they can do so three times on a single item.
When I landed the 1% critical hit chance after my first enchant I was thrilled. Then I got a magic find and my experience increase. Will I could have spent further gold to remove those. I decided since there was a decent chance it would not be long before replacing that level 17 item I’d rather just save my gold.
While there are other things to spend gold on as well like item gambling. I have not played around with that at all. At this point, I feel like hoarding gold and then spending it unless it’s enchanting. I’m sure later on when the game gets even harder and I need to spend time farming for gear I’ll feel differently about that.
One thing that I love that is a carryover from Torchlight is when you are off hacking and slashing up a storm and filling up your inventory. You don’t have to stop and waste a town portal to head back to town. You can just load up your pet and send them away to auto-sell the junk you don’t want. It only takes 2 minutes before them to return anyways. I wish more games had a feature like this one. I’d settle just for everything getting dumped into storage which is sadly not an option in this game.
This is also quite a needed feature. The game has some loot explosions even more so if you are killing some kind of boss. It’s more than enough for someone like me to feel satisfied and not overwhelmed. Perhaps some games can learn from this one that you should not need an item filter just to see the ground let alone find something worthwhile to loot.
Despite the lack of a complex skill setup I have found that even fighting bosses might take a moment to down. It to not be that hard on normal game settings. I’m sure if I had jacked up the difficulty I would be getting owned just for the gear I’m wearing alone.
Thankfully my Berserker has a shockingly large amount of healing. He has a passive that has a chance to heal. I have some natural healing per second on my gear. I have a socketed item that heals per hit. Then you have an active skill I can use for even further healing. When all that fails and even the healing item I got on my pet is not enough I can start drinking health potions like a drunk at a bar.
How? Why? Or when? Have I been killed in this game with so much healing? That is a question I sometimes wonder myself as well. I mean it has happened a total of four times. Only when I enter into zones that warn me with red level numbers I’m far below the level recommendation. At least they let me in and die like a fool.
Final Thoughts
So far I’ve had enough fun I’ll play this game a bit more and maybe make another post or two on it. Since the dungeons are so quick to run along with the outdoor zones. It’s not going to be one of those games where I’m making a post per zone and dungeon in the game.
I also know my current build is rather horrible. Don’t worry I won’t be trying to make a guide on dreadful builds. I’ll be lucky to limp by on the skills I’ve selected so far. Hopefully, I’ll be able to correct things the best I can before once I finish the first four acts and you start over on a higher difficulty like a lot of ARPGs out there.
Ultimately this game checks off my I just want to smash things with weapons and not have much of a thought rolling around in my brain to do so. Some days you are just in that kind of mood. The world is a crazy and complex thing enough and you just need a break from it sometimes.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Torchlight II.
Discloser: Game received for free.
