Torchlight II

Torchlight II doesn't even try to take itself seriously from the narrative point of view, because it immediately and without too many compliments throws us in the middle of the action. The first levels of experience fly fast and we immediately have the opportunity to explore the development system of our Embermage: there are three branches of specialization (in our case fire, ice and electricity) and each of them offers seven active and three passive skills , for a total of 30 skills to choose from. Each skill also has 15 boost levels and every five you have access to an additional bonus, such as a greater range on our Magma Lance. You get one skill point every time you gain an experience level (the maximum is 100) and one of fame, so the total of points to spend is about 130, which means you cannot maximize all the spells and that choices will have to be made. Skills are progressively unlocked as you level up and around level 40 you will have access to all of them, as there are no prerequisites for learning one skill over another. This system is quite classic, it expands the one already seen in Torchlight and, although on paper it offers a good possibility of customization, in practice it limits a lot of experimentation, because it is possible to change only the allocation of the last three points awarded by paying the amount of gold required by the appropriate non-player character. I would have much preferred greater freedom of choice from this point of view, because being able to change the specialization of our character without too many limits removes the risk of the game becoming repetitive, an endemic problem of the Hack & Slash genre.

The animal that accompanies us on our adventures is very useful.

The four new Torchlight II classes offer an excellent variety of game styles and approach to combat and are all quite classic, with the exception of the Engineer, with its turrets and robots. Thanks to the four selectable difficulty levels, the game manages to present an adequate challenge even on the first lap and, while ordinary enemies have original and challenging designs and attack modes, the bosses are the real stars of the game. The fights against them are truly memorable and often take many minutes of intense struggle to complete. There is no shortage of Champions, ordinary monsters of larger size and characteristics than their younger brothers, who can be found anywhere in the game world and who will offer a loot adequate to their lineage once eliminated.

Loot, the ton of equipment to be collected and collected, is the centerpiece of every self-respecting Hack & Slash and Torchlight II does not disappoint in this respect for quantity and quality. There are many varieties of weapons that can satisfy everyone's playing style and the armor design is guessed and creative. As if that were not enough, you can further customize it thanks to the magical gems collected and the random spells offered by the special character that we will find waiting for us at the base camp (but there are also some more powerful ones hidden in the depths of the most insidious dungeons). Compared to that of its predecessor, the world of Torchlight II is more open and airy, and not only thanks to the greater extension of its map (about four times larger, say the developers). Although it is not a sandbox setting game, the sensation of exploration and adventure is more marked than in the past and the large maps allow you to wander for a long time and always find something new. The design of the settings is generally good, although sometimes it lacks originality (as for example in the long part in the desert area). The dungeons also impress positively thanks to a good work from the aesthetic point of view, which offers greater variety than the predecessor.

In multiplayer, monsters have more life and deal more damage.

Torchlight II capitalizes on the positive elements of the predecessor and improves them. The addition of online multiplayer (in peer to peer) is an important novelty and an essential feature in a game of this genre. Its implementation is not the best when it comes to organizing games with friends, but once you start playing, you will quickly forget this flaw. Torchlight II offers a huge amount of content, thanks to a mode that unlocks once the game is completed and that allows you to face the dungeons, to the New Game + that makes us start the game over again with all our skills and our equipment in a world infested with monsters of a level appropriate to ours, not to mention the total support of the mods that the community will soon produce.

Alessandro De Luca always turns with a shoulder bag in which to put the loot he collects during high-level raids in the supermarket. You can find him on Twitter, but he never talks about his adventures so as not to reveal secrets to opposing explorers.

Torchlight II is in every respect a game "more" than the original. People from Runic Games created it for a long time and carefully (after all, the premiere was initially supposed to take place at the end of 2011), improving and refining all its aspects. However, some things have not changed. Torchlight II is still a fun, fairy-tale hack'n'slash, based on 100% classic principles developed by Diablo years ago .

At the very beginning, let's deal with the plot , which is only a pretext for a click marathon. In the first part of the game, the town of Torchlight was faced with a great threat from the dragon Ordraka and the mass of creatures that live in the mines near the city. Three brave heroes dealt with the monster, but one of them - the alchemist - was possessed by the heart of the dragon, imbued with the energy of Heat (the magical substance mined from under the earth) and destroyed the town, then went further to disturb the balance between the elements and release the ancient from the abyss. Evil. As you can see - a classic, in which, of course, there is a new team of brave heroes to stop the villain and save the world. Fortunately, the plot has never been the most important thing in this type of game, although I would definitely not be offended if it were presented in a more interesting way and populated with memorable characters (there are no such characters).

Torchlight II offers 4 new hero classes. The first is embermage, the alchemist's equivalent of "one", a wizard based on firepower, electricity and frost. The next one to compete with Evil is the berserker - a barbarian-viking hybrid gifted with a crazy look, who yells at enemies and befriends wolves. Another class is the outlander - a fast, agile lover of firearms, blades and basic magic. The stakes are closed by a steampunk engineer, an expert in all kinds of mechanisms, creating a connoisseur of hammers and flames in flight. The Runic Games team focused on surprisingly large possibilities of creating the appearance of the character - we can choose the gender, as well as one of several types of skin color, face shape or hair style. Each of the daredevils must additionally have a companion of misery in the form of a pet. There are eight of them in TII (dogs, panthers, hawks, ferrets and other weirdos) and they all prove to be irreplaceable on the battlefield.

Characters have three skill trees at their disposal, each with 7 active and three passive abilities , and learning points are gained when reaching the next level of experience and when our character becomes more famous (fame increases when we kill champions, bosses and after completing tasks). The leveling itself is also related to the heroes' statistics. Four basic factors: strength, dexterity, magic (here: focus) and vitality can be improved by ourselves after reaching a higher level of experience. So it is a perfect proposition for everyone who did not like the changes introduced in the third "Devil" .

To conclude the description of measurable things: Torchlight II is three large acts, randomly generated maps, an almost innumerable tons of equipment and monsters to kill, and quite a fun co-op mode for up to 6 players at once. Importantly, playing solo does not require setting up any accounts or waiting for servers, just like playing on the local network. Only the game via the Internet requires an account on the Runic Games website, and then you can play around as much as you want (the computer of the assuming game acts as a server for the duration of the game). So you can see that Torchlight II is an improved and enlarged in every respect "one". Exactly the same path was taken as Blizzard once took to create Diablo II .

Now it's time to write about what cannot be measured. Is Torchlight II really as cool as the creators and many players already familiar with this game create? Does it withstand the competition with Diablo III (although both games can painlessly exist next to each other, the competition in the hack'n'slash field takes place anyway)? To answer very briefly - actually yes. Anyway, the rating above speaks for itself.

I decided that the best class to beat the game would be an engineer. A monocle, a large mustache, an elegant white mane and a dinosaur-like Januszek as a brave companion (by the way, after testing the other classes, I state with full force that embermage is still good, while berserker and outlander are in my opinion clearly weaker and playing with them is less fun ) . After entering act one, we admire the beautiful, fairy-tale graphics and hear very devilish music (Matt Uelmen created the soundtracks to two parts of Diablo , now illustrates Torchlights and does it with style, although in several places he clearly copies himself), and our task is simple. Click all monsters to death. To work.

Levels drop very quickly (when the story is completed, after about 14 hours, I was level 52 - for comparison: Diablo III is 18 hours for me to play the game once and level 32), so we don't wait long for new skills to help you decimate the beast. There is an issue with skills. During beta testing, there was a slight increase in power at subsequent levels of a given skill. This has been corrected, but there are clogging powers on each of the three trees. The ones that probably won't be used by anyone, because they are either too similar to others or seem completely useless. Torchlight II is the most fun when you invest heavily in 3-4 "spells" - especially that every 5 power levels (out of 15 possible) there is an additional effect or a clear strengthening of the effect of a given skill (important: in the game world there are NPCs who can restore the skill points spent, but only the last 3).

The battles themselves can be chaotic at times (especially when we use an extremely effective AoE power, and there are a lot of monsters), but the joy of a well-aimed hammer blow to the belly of a beast is not so bad. At the end of the game, when our character has at least 1 possible max skill, we feel like an unstoppable machine for mowing unwelcome. However, please take the amendment to the fact that we are talking about the normal level of difficulty, which is in fact the equivalent of easy. It is practically impossible to die here, and everything happens quickly and pleasantly. Therefore, I recommend that veterans start from a higher level - then the problem is the first bigger boss with his entourage, and the satisfaction with getting out of a tight situation turns out to be much greater.

Breaking through the levels is pure pleasure thanks to a lot of variety. The first act is about meadow and winter climates, and the dungeons in it are usually classic caves. Then the game leads us to a desert land where we plunge into the dunes, penetrate the ruins and the underground full of steampunk mechanisms. So far, the affinity with Diablo II is all too visible. Fortunately, the third act introduces something new: here we visit dense coniferous forests and a pinch of voodoo and werewolf swamps. Very nice additions to the standard tasks such as "find and kill" or "find and bring (and kill along the way)" are randomly generated challenges, the source of which are phase beasts. After killing such a creature, a portal opens, leading to a small map, where a unique mission awaits us. I found, among others: "Survive in the arena", "Take the totems out of the ground" or "Defend the magic crystals against enemies". Clever.