Torchlight 2

Thanks to +Ahmed Jadaa I've been able to get through a lot of games that have co-op features that I kind of just forgot about. This new push of getting through games hasn't entirely been fun though.

I remember I picked up the first Torchlight after the League of Legends Mac Beta ended back in like 2010 or something because I needed a time sink and I had a pretty good time with it. Not much has changed on the business side from the first to the second Torchlight. It was like its predecessor developed and published by Runic Games back in 2012 and is exclusively playable on a PC on both Mac and Windows. I played the game on my PC through Steam, because PC master race, blah, blah.

Seeing as Torchlight II is a hack and slash dungeon crawler there are a number of things you have to note down and know to expect from the genre. As a general rule these games are really light on plot and narrative as they are designed to be cathartic exercises in killing monsters. This game isn't an exception with the overall plot being that one of the characters from the previous games is now evil and needs to be killed by some new heroes (i.e. the exact plot already used in a Diablo game). The entire game only has like four cut scenes and very little is done to bring anything to life in the game. But no one plays dungeon crawlers for the story.

People play dungeons crawlers to crawl through dungeons and beat the ever loving shit out of everything they see in the game. To that effect this game gives you a pretty solid experience. The game have four default classes and each of them has three different skill trees that allows for a fairly large amount of varied builds that you can actually do with any one character. On top of that there are a number of mods for the game that can literally quadruple the number of classes in the game that are still actually balanced adding a massive amount of variety for you to actually build a character you genuinely want to play as. The world in the game itself is also well designed in that you won't come across to many repeat monsters as you go through them all which is nice since it shows the developers put effort into the creature design and didn't just decide to just do pallet swaps on a monster five times and pretend that counted as actual work like I don't know, the people who make Final Fantasy or Diablo. The loot system in the game that determines that drops items I guess is fair as well, the stronger the monsters the higher the chance of good items dropping. I did find myself actually buying from the stores in the towns a few times, but that was more the exception than the rule. I don't really know what else to say about the loot system, I'm not really an expert in these pants grinding simulators.

The game obviously looks and sounds a bit rough around the edges now since its been three years since it was published, but I thought it was still doing fine. The world and the stages within it are nicely varied, colorful and populous. The character design is a bit short of details though, I don't I noticed a mouth on my character actually. The sound design in the game also seems to have missed a beat, it took me a while to notice it since the sound effects were so load and I was pretty busy either yelling at +Ahmed Jadaa or listening to his cries of terror as he suddenly ran out of mana potions but he did in the end point out that the game actually lacked background music which is a major deficiency if you are playing alone.

Very little has changed from the first Torchlight to the second one. Its is still a solid dungeon crawling experience that a bunch of people are still actually playing. The availability of mods also makes the game pretty huge and varied compared to even the most modern dungeon crawler. Something has changed with me though since I played the last Torchlight. I'm not longer a student looking for a time sink. I'm an adult with a job and shit to do and I really didn't have much fun playing this game just so that I could review it. I guess I'm just not the same person I was so I can't actually recommend this game to anyone as I didn't enjoy playing it. Old me would give this a thumbs up though.