Final Impressions: Torchlight 2 Beta

The Torchlight 2 beta winds down today at 4 PM Pacific time. I've been spending too much time playing, so it's probably a good thing it's over. I've already wrote a couple things about the game:

• First Impressions
• Beta Review

Here are a few more thoughts based on the last couple days of play.

Man this game is fun. I was talking with a friend about the beta the other day, and he said something along the lines of "I can tell you really like this?" When I asked him why, he said "Because I haven't been able to say anything for the last five minutes." Yeah apparently I was gushing a bit.

I've now played the game with all the classes. I think Engineer is my favorite, followed by Embermage and Outlander in a near tie for second. Berserker feels a little under-powered at this point, and I couldn't really find a build I was happy with there after a couple tries. The Engineer, with choice of giant hitting stick or giant cannon, plus various robots, is just a blast to play. Embermage has some hilariously powerful spell combos tucked away in the talent trees. Using just the limited talents available in beta, my favorite combo had to be Thunder Locus plus Frozen Fate. Thunder Locus drops a localized thunderstorm in the environment, and Frozen Fate causes monsters you kill to freeze nearby foes in place for a few seconds. Cue Embermage running in circles around a ball of lightning while chased by packs of monsters... Well I'm sure you get the picture.

Last night I managed to connect up with a friend and make a hard run at a Veteran difficulty game. Veteran coupled with multi-player scaling made for a pretty tough challenge, though admittedly we were blitzing everything in a rather disorganized fashion. Playing through the whole game on Veteran revealed a couple new features. First, we found a little side dungeon in the frozen wastes, and second, we found a fun little un-lockable treasure in the slaver's den. I'd never seen these features in normal mode, but I'm not sure they're difficulty based or purely random. Along the way I also caught a sort of super-web fish that permanently turned my pet into a giant spider, yet another reason to go fishing.

Overall I'm impressed by Torchlight 2. There are some problems, odd action bar button implementation, the occasional misplaced chest or monster, and some minor overload on graphics in intense combat scenes, but these problems don't detract all that much from a very fun game. I'm now ready for it to be summer so I can play the real game!

A final note for my readers (all three of you) who are more interested in tabletop RPGs, I realize things have been heavy on the video game side recently. Don't worry, I haven't abandoned you. It's been a busy time in video game land, and my posts reflect that. I'll be back to tabletop soon!