While the original Torchlight came out during the time when “Diablo-clone” action RPGs were almost entirely absent from the market, Torchlight II arrived in 2012, and things looked quite different. Among many announced and awaited titles we had two huge releases. Diablo III came out earlier the same year and despite receiving a lot of criticism, it was Diablo and that title still meant something. And in a related genre, Borderlands 2 got released just a couple of days before Torchlight II and despite being more of the FPS, the whole “looter shooter” concept the first title helped popularize had an clear overlap in audience. None the less, the game wasn’t lost and forgotten and got a lot of well deserved praise. Including from me at the time, so I was curious if my opinion would be any different over 10 years later.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way. Since the original Torchlight was basically the first Diablo but with newer mechanics, I guess everyone kinda expected Torchlight II to be Diablo II. And it is. To a fault, really. I mean, the story is almost exactly the same, just less interesting and atmospheric. Though, what has been improved over the first game is that the story is, at least, genuinely trying this time around. The whole experience no longer feels like it’s just pure mechanics with the randomly generated story added as a flavor. And, in fact, in the last big Act of the game we actually get some fun moody locations and even a quest that’s built around a story for a change. But, sadly, that’s still an exception in the game.
The gameplay, however, has been improved greatly in every conceivable way. Being more overworld driven, just like Diablo II, the big issue with aiming across different heights is almost never present, shift+attack in general feels better, every attack and skill feel even better and punchier than before. The pet variety has been increased by a lot and what pets can do is also improved. The town portals now stay where you last put them forever, instead being a portable waypoint, even saved between reloads of the game which is extremely useful. Skills, abilities and many mechanics have been rebalanced in lots of tiny but meaningful ways and that, with a new set of selectable classes (which you can even visually customize this time around), make the game feel really really good.
But the core is your classic Diablo-like gameplay, just with more focus on vacuuming the floor for all loot, just like Torchlight (and Borderlands). Which is both great and a bit of a shame. For how much you can criticize Diablo III at how so much of it feels so oversimplified that there are no stakes in how you spec your character, all the classes there feel truly unique. And the movesets are all built around the resources that the class has instead of the classic mana pool. Torchlight II tries to approach a similar idea while keeping the classic rules and concepts in, but it’s not always as interesting.
For example, no stat is meaningless for a particular class – all of them are useful and it’s always a matter of what you wish to concentrate more on. Equipment requirements, due to that, are now set by a level or a stat, so if you’re specializing a character into something, you can wear something “early”. Each class also has a special combo-meter-like thing called Charge which grows as you keep attacking the enemies and gives you benefits for doing so. Diablo III only used this for experience and speed bonuses, but Torchlight II goes further with the idea and you get more benefits from this that are unique to each class. It’s neat, but given that some of the class abilities are extremely similar between these two games, I can still say that more often than not Diablo III makes more interesting decisions that just feel better in practice.
But then again, what’s really good about Torchlight II is that despite it improving so many things about the classic formula of these types of games, it doesn’t diverge from it much, trying to be an improvement not a game changer. The game knows what it wants to be and just embraces that from the start until the end, almost without a fault. Almost, though, as for whatever reason the final dungeon can be very frustrating, mainly because it returns all of those height-based issues from the first Torchlight into a dungeon that’s longer than most others. Thankfully, it’s not overly long anyway and after that the game unlocks new game plus (that adds new dungeons to the main game) and infinite dungeons, just like in the first game, which are available from the start even in the new game plus cycle. Retiring characters isn’t a thing anymore, though.
You have to be in the mood for classic clicking monsters to death, getting cool items and smartly managing skills mood to play Torchlight II. But if you are, it’s a blast even today. Where so many other otherwise great titles had the ambition to go further, but stumbled and rolled back to being “just a Diablo clone” (like The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing or Grim Dawn), Torchlight II is proud to be just that and it tries to make the experience as fun as possible. Shame that after this game the franchise, essentially, died. But you can always replay Torchlight II.