Sunday, September 23

Cool

Torchlight II

In short, Torchlight II offers you more and better Torchlight.  More character choices (four classes, all available as male and female, against the three choices in total in the original), more pets (up from two choices to eight), more towns, more dungeons, more monster-splatting goodness.  The story picks up right where the original left off, with everything you'd set to rights promptly going wrong again.

I played the Vanquisher in the original (read: hot shooty chick), so I'm playing a female Outlander in the new one, which provides much the same deal, though I'm mostly using a shotgun this time rather than dual-wielding pistols.  A shotgun with a bayonet, mind you, which is frankly terrifying.

I'm likely to come back for a replay later too, because both the Embermage and the Engineer look like interesting classes to play.  (And it's about time an RPG had an Engineer character class!)  I tried the Destroyer in the original (hulking barbarian type), and it was all a bit meh.

If you enjoyed the original and wanted more, then this truly delivers.  If you didn't like the original, then you're a bad person.

And if you haven't played the original, there's never been a better time to pick it up.  It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it's part of the latest Humble Bundle, which means you can get it DRM free, plus four or five other games, for just a few dollars.  The Humble Bundle is a name-your-own-price deal, but you get extra goodies if you pay more than the current average, and part of it goes to the EFF and Child's Play, both well worth supporting.  The current average is just $5.84, but they've sold over 200,000 bundles in this deal so far.

Metacritic is showing an average review score of 90, and an average user score of 9.2. (Why one is out of 100 and the other out of 10 I don't know.)  Diablo III rated 88 on reviews but a dreadful 3.8 on user scores, because it disappointed the existing Diablo fans, particularly with the flaky servers at launch time.  

Torchlight II doesn't disappoint.  This is no story-driven epic like Dragon Age: Origins, but it doesn't want to be; it's comfortable with what it is.  And what it is is a whole lot of fun for twenty bucks.

I'll go with the crowd here and give it 9/10.  It's not going to change the course of computer gaming (I have my hopes pinned on several recent Kickstarter projects for that), but if you ever wanted to take a firearm to a fantasy trope, this is for you.

Also, it has goggle-wearing ferrets.  That in itself is worth the price of admission.

Torchlight II: Shooting ratlins so hard they explode since September 20.

Update: If you're still on the fence, try this: Engineers can build robots.  Clanky little steampunk robots.  And you start out armed with a hundred-pound pipe wrench.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:11 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 492 words, total size 4 kb.

1

I looked at one of the trailers, and my impression was that this is like Diablo. Is that the basic idea?

Obviously it's a lot newer, and obviously therefore it's got a lot better graphics. Does it have any kind of multi-player mode?

I really liked Diablo, but after I really got into it and started playing it heavily, my right hand started to hurt really badly. I had to quit, and it took months before the pain went away. I assume it was "repetitive stress" etc. caused by me holding onto the mouse strongly while playing.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, September 23 2012 04:41 PM (+rSRq)

2 It plays a lot like Diablo, but it's a bit lighter in tone and feel.  More approachable, I guess, particularly now with Diablo III's cash auction house gumming up the works.

Torchlight was single-player, but Torchlight II has LAN and internet multiplayer for up to six people at a time.  I haven't tried that yet, but I think it would be a lot of fun.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 23 2012 05:27 PM (PiXy!)

3 Far less clicking than the first Diablo; I don't think anyone has ever tried to replicate the RSI feature of that game.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, September 24 2012 08:54 AM (2XtN5)

4 It's been so long since I played Diablo I'd forgotten that aspect.  In Torchlight, you just hold down the button to attack continuously (or until your enemy is splat).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 24 2012 08:39 PM (PiXy!)

5

It probably was the fact that you had to click for every strike that wrecked my hand. I used to play the archer, so it was a click for every arrow, and most enemies took a lot of arrows.

Just thinking about it is making my hand ache.

It's interesting that Duke Nukem 3D didn't do that to me. I played that an amazing amount of time and had no trouble.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, September 26 2012 12:59 PM (+rSRq)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Comments are disabled. Post is locked.
44kb generated in CPU 0.0114, elapsed 0.2424 seconds.
56 queries taking 0.2347 seconds, 234 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.