I didnt really like Torchlight 1 so I wasnt really that excited to eventually play this one. Its been in my 'shit games' category on steam for over 10 years now. Finally I decided to play it, mostly because of the co-op.
To play online with friends the game has an account system. So after logging in you then get a server browser. This part can be fucky and either crashes sometimes or you have to fumble around trying to join eachothers game before some random does. It works fine enough I guess. Then you pick one of four classes: Berserker, Outlander, Engineer and Embermage. We both picked Berserker because we just wanted to do a standard barbarian warrior type guy and that seemed most suitable.
Torchlight 2 starts where the first game ends off. In Torchlight 1, you just have a central hub down and you crawl deeper into a dungeon. Now, in Torchlight 2, at the beginning of the game you get some text about how the town is destroyed and this and that, and now the game is sort of open world and features many different towns and locations. Thats a big central design change compared to the first game. So you just go through these grassy green fields slaying your first groups of enemies until you come across the first town. Now, right out of the gate its hard to ignore the elephant in the room (for me). The artstyle is just atrocious in this game. I didn't like Torchlight 1's artstyle and atmosphere much, but its much, much worse here. Everything looks like a lame sunday morning childs cartoon. The game just feels immature. Like it almost makes me self conscious to play such childish looking games. Who is this intended for? 7 year olds? It sucks. The cutscenes are quite possibly some of the worst I have ever seen in gaming. Extremely lame and low budget looking college safe art project slideshows almost like superhero cartoon vibes. That has the effect of making me give zero shits about the story and plot. So the game is almost an absolute chore to look at, and now I dont give a shit about the story. Not off to a good start. I mean, the UI is alright, the inventory is acceptable and (this is a weird acknowledgement) but I like how the boxes of text float around as you move your mouse cursor, theres something oddly satisfying about that feature. But for the most part the graphics are bad, and the artstyle is just not for me. Maybe I can even acknowledge that they might have did a "good job" at achieving their certain artstyle, but its like saying good job to a toddlers drawing or something.
The game presents you with difficulty choices when you start it, which is something kind of odd for an ARPG. Usually ARPGS like Diablo, for example, only scale the difficulty when youve already played through the campaign, as a very hand crafted carefully curated difficulty curve experience. But being able to choose hard difficulties at the start of the game makes me question the balancing. Like how is it working? The enemies get more health but I still do the same amount of damage? so essentially all thats changed here is the requirement to full clear every zone and do every side quest in order to be 'up to par' in comparison to the Normal difficulty. So thats what we felt compelled to do. We chose Veteran difficulty, because that was the reccomended setting "for people who have played Arpgs before" , and we basically full cleared every single zone, uncovered all the map fog, and tried to do every side quest just to be able to scrape by and have enough experience to be properly levelled. Usually in other arpgs, fully clearing every zone and doing every side quest rewards you by being significantly overpowered and higher level than the mobs, but for some reason in Torchlight 2, we were still always just barely at the proper level for the zone we were at, making it all feel not so optional.
The game has four acts, act 1 is a standard grassy fields overworld with a village and some dungeons. Act 2 is the desert act, surprise surprise, big Diablo 2 influence here. Act 3 is this poison swamp area. Act 4 is a single short quest that takes place in some metallic robot dungeon. Really nothing inspirational or memorable here. Apparently I played halfway through the game over 10 years ago (looking at my unlcked achievements), but I dont have a single memory of any of it, that goes to show how unmemorable the whole thing is. It's all bog standard and uncreative. Even most of the enemy designs are boring, tedious, or annoying. For instance in Act 2 its like most of what you'll be fighting is hordes of insects and pests. The enemy design at times can be exciting, mostly in those optional netherworld dungeon places, they have more hellish looking monsters, but for the most part even the monster designs are cartoonish bullshit thats neither threatening,exciting, or interesting. Like to me, a lot of what makes ARPGs exciting is having threatening monsters that keeps you on your toes and makes you make interesting character decisions, but here you barely even notice them. Don't get me wrong, the game is decently challenging and we did die frequently, but it wasnt really due to the monsters being intimidating but rather either being half asleep , playing lazily, or some resistance being fucked up and having to change around gear.
There are a few things the game does relatively good, though.
The gear systems and stats are actually interesting and you do have to make calculated decisions. It has lots of different stats you have to account for, basic resistances, attack speeds, health, damage bonuses when certain criteria is filled, armor, Minus armor per hit etc. Items can roll with a decent variety of stats that mostly keeps gearing exciting. For weapons, there is a "DPS" number so at a glance you can quickly get an idea of how much damage certain weapons do, but its not the end all be all because the actual individual stats rolled on items can be more important. While the gear doesnt look very visually appealing on your character, atleast the actual mechanics are engaging enough. For the most part I tried to be a two hand sword warrior type guy, and the game mostly made that possible and rewarded me a bit for that commitment. Getting unique drops were exciting, and theres a good amount of them too. Its odd that green colored items are the lowest tier, and blue colored items are higher tier. That tripepd me up a lot because usually its the opposite.
The stats are standard ARPG fare, Strength, Dex, Vitality, Magic... I pretty much dumped 99% of my points into strength for more damage, though if I wanted to focus on Critical strikes I could have put a bunch into Dex, or if I was dual wielding weapons it also apparently gives you a dual wield bonus if you put points into Focus, so theres a variety of choices here too.
Unfortunately a big flaw with the game, atleast for me, was the skill trees just were not interesting at all. Every single skill was not something that was appealing to me and that I actively didnt want to use. At least for the Berseker class I chose, cant speak about the other ones. The Berserker class appeared to be the most basic warrior/barbarian type character, though the entire skill tree and its 3 tabs didnt give me basically any options to just be a sword swinging warrior. It was all Druid type shit like "Turn into wolves, summon wolves," and then one of the trees was based on elemental damage for some stupid reason? Like "Summon ice storms, Imbue your attacks with lightning" . And then the main melee tree was stuff like Eviserate, which is you do this AOE attack but briefly turn into a wolf and attack with these claws. None of it was about the actual playstyle that I wanted to be. Either the game is just really unclear with its classes, or the skills just suck. Like, is Engineer the warrior guy? Who would look at Engineer and think "Yeah thats the two hand warrior class". No one. The Berserker sounds like the melee class, but all the skills dont encourage the typical warrior stuff. So for the whole game I was disappointingly using these stupid wolf claws attack, and dumping most of my points into the permanent passive buffs, because atleast those apply to everything. Theres just not that much choice for skills. Eventually I unlocked a few buffs like throwing a banner down in a circle which grants buffs to yourself and allies and debuffs enemies, and I used Howl which further debuffs enemies. But that was basically all the variety I had in skills and what appealed to me. Towards the latter half of the game I unlocked Ravage, which is basically almost the exact same as the former Eviserate but more effective. So...finally unlocked the epitome skill, and its the same damn wolf claw animation. Disappointing. I just want to swing with , you know, my actual weapon. Whatever, they fucked it all up.
At least for the Berseker class the game has a Frenzy system in which, you have this meter that fills up according to how much damage you do, then when it reaches the top every attack you do is a crit and you pump out tons of damage for a brief period of time. You can increase this amount of time through items/skill tree. So probably the most satisfying part of combat was actually trying to fill this meter up and then getting a blast of frenzy and spriting around the level trying to kill as many mobs with it as possible. The actual gameplay and combat is just okay, it was definitely more fun with the frenzy stuff. I like that the monsters explode into gore sometimes, and the game does a decent job with its pacing with monster density. The first half of the game you can almost get away with just single target attacks, not too many mobs on screen. But then the second half you get swarmed with tons of mosnters requiring AOE attacks and lots of stuff going around on the screen, so it gives you a taste of both styles. Still, some of the controls can be a bit frustrating. Like, it felt like I'd have this problem where I would be attacking a monster and using skills, but then I would be taking damage and need to run away ASAP, but my character was comitted to some action and he would just refuse to move until the animation was over, resulting in my death.
The game has a Fame system, which rewards and encourages you to kill these purple miniboss enemies. So its a good use of your time to go around and explore every nook and cranny to kill these guys. When you get a certain amount of fame, you get a skill point. Its cool the game makes it worth your time to explore, but at the same time it almost feels mandatory to do so because you'd be left without so many skill points otherwise, so its a weird conflicting feeling I have about the system. The balance of the game overall is just questionable.
None of the quests really stand out or are interesting. Theres barely any different in the Side quests and Main quests. They dont really seem that different or distinguishable. Most of the time its just fetch quests to go inside some dungeon and grab an item or kill some boss in a big arena. The game does have a fair amount of these dedicated arena boss fights, which were probably a highlight of the whole thing. But still, none of them really stand out in my mind after the whole things over with. Cant really remember any. After every act you get these god awful cutscenes I was talking about, makes the game seem like such a joke.
Death isnt that punishing, you can choose to respawn in town and lose nothing or respawn in the same area but lose gold and XP. Ive never once respawned in the same area, just go back to town then instantly warp to your co-op partner using the portal. The game is really forgiving with teleporting around, you can instnatly warp to your friend or his last portal or your own infinitely. So death is really just a minor annoyance.
Torchlight 1 had a pet system, where you can send your pet to town to pickup health potions for you and make him sell some junk gear. Its not really that much more developed here. Your pet has 3 modes, Offensive, Defensive, and neither. But it doesnt really seem to matter. When your pet dies, he respawns like 15 seconds later anyway. You pet can wear 3 items, like a collar and tags, but its not a big deal. Theres this fishing mechanic where you can feed fish to your pet to transform him briefly but it just seemed like a gimmick or waste of time. The pet could of had a skill tree or something, but no, it feels bare bones.
The game kinda just slogs along. Half of the time I was falling asleep playing it. Just a lot of roaming around killing generic uninspired mobs in open fields and the occasional generic dungeon. Towards the end of the game you get to this swamp act where theres all sorts of purple poison shit everywhere that kills you fast, or these tentacles coming out the ground that hurt, but thats about the most notable thing. The best things Torchlight 2 does is the item statistics, some of the arena based boss fights, and the general combat is sort of satisfying - at least it doesnt have level scaling like some other shit ARPGs do. But really the game is just a medicore chore most of the time. The awful artstyle is just insult to injury. The last act of the game is pretty lame too, you start fighting all these robots and mechs and the last boss is pretty anticlimactic, its like this weird lizard dragon guy that we killed without much hassle.
Theres a bunch of end game stuff you can do, like this mapping system (Is this where Path of Exile got its mapping system from!?) and you can also go to New game +. But yeah...I'm not interested in any of that if the base game is really medicore to me. A lot of people seem to praise Torchlight 2, I guess i can sort of see why, its just not for me. I heard that Fate is like the predecessor of Torchlight, and yeah I do have some nostalgia for that game, and yeah it does have a similar sort of kiddy immature artstyle, but I dont know - something tells me I can get more into Fate than I can these Torchlight games. Maybe one day I'll give that a shot. And oh yeah, Torchlight 3 and beyond looks even way worse than this shit so I can only imagine how atrocious that will be. Maybe one day I'll have to find out, as well. As long as these games are playable co-op then they're at least tolerable
4/10
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