My love of dungeon crawlers started with Diablo. I played Diablo so much in my youth I still know what some of the prefixes and suffixes mean, "Of the zodiac" being the most sought after, dat all attribute buff. I also played some lesser known ones, Nox being one of my favorite that seems to have disappeared into the ether of gaming past. And followed the genre all the way through Dungeon Seige and Diablo 2 although I didn't bother with Diablo 3, real money auction house? Fuck off.
So on to Torchlight. I actually forgot to make this post at the time of my playthrough, I'm not really sure why but that's not important, here's Torchlight 2.
Torchlight 2 starts pretty much the same way all dungeons crawlers start, character creation. There's only 4 classes in Torchlight, but I kind of like the lack of options. I played as an Outlander because he had guns, something very absent from dungeon crawlers past. Something nice that they added in Torchlight was the pet idea. Everyone knows the worst part of all dungeon crawlers is walking back to town to sell shit. Well Torchlight solves this by allowing your pet to do it for you. If you don't think about it too hard, it fits very nicely into the game. But they made me name my pet, that took 20 minutes and a consultation from my girlfriend to come up with a name, but Dante the wolf was a worthy companion.
There's not too much to say about Torchlight 2 mechanically. It plays pretty much like everything else. Click around, click things to death, etc, etc. The game ran nicely, looked pretty and wasn't buggy at all. Very sound overall which is touch for a game like this to be. It did feel like they may have followed Diablo 2 a little too closely in some places, socketing gems anyone, encampment, desert, swamp, place with lots of fire, but it works.
What can be said is the game was not designed for me. I mentioned previously in a post that I have stayed away from Borderlands 2 due to lack of people to play with. I played Borderlands one, but I did it solo, the game just plain isn't designed for that. Everything seems kind of lonely and boss fights seemed geared towards a team rather than one person.
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| This guy in particular |
Dungeon Seige fixed this by allowing you to have an NPC party, and that made the game feel like solo play was still an option.
I'm not opposed to multiplayer games, I play quite a few, most of which are listed in my "Un-Fucking Your Steam Library" post I made. But I like the option to go it solo if I feel like it. But games with story and classes require you to have a set of people who can play the whole thing with you. If you play with someone way ahead of you, they're dragging you along and if you're ahead, you can get bored trying to get to where you stopped.
But I persevered and I'm glad I did. The main story wasn't overly interesting but the side quests were. The game is nicely designed, especially in the environments, some of the places were awesome to look at. The game was nicely balanced, never being overly hard or overly easy and never giving you too much money as to where it became pointless. And, my most pleasant discovery, when you beat the story, the game isn't even close to being out of stuff for you to do. The end game gives you a lot of options. You can run instances of dungeons with mutators on, you can fight super hard bosses, or you can start a new game+. I sunk 26 hours into Torchlight and there's still plenty to do. It can get a little grindy at points, a little frustrating at points, but it still caused me to watch a few sunrises from my desk, and sticking ability is hard to come by.
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| Suck it ghost dragon |
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