Torchlight II

"Diablo's little brother. Just better." Torchlight II is a typical hack&slay game by Runic games and the successor of Torchlight I. The gameplay is quite simple: Basically you just run around, kill monsters, level up, explore and clear dungeons, find better and rarer weapons and listen to short dialogues (that's how the story is told). Torchlight II tries to bring a little bit variety into the game- and gunplay: You don't just kill monsters and go from dungeon to dungeon, you e.g. have to find dynamite and blow something up to come into the next stage of a room. You have to find pieces of a puzzle (it's also not really varied, but still better than having everything in one dungeon.) or something like that. It's better than nothing, but you still get annoyed after playing the game for more than 4 hours straight. What I found to be quite good is that there are 3 types of monsters: 1. "Normal" monsters appear in most cases. 2. "Champions" are stronger than normal monsters and have a chance to drop something rare. 3. The "Bosses" are quite rare, very demanding and always drop rare and expensive items. This brings variety to the game, because you have to be prepared for everything. I have died quite a lot! :D There are 4 classes in Torchlight II: The Outlander (thief), the Embermage (wizard), the Berserker (tank) and the Engineer. I played as an Embermage. The game has pets which can fly to the city, sell your stuff and buy new healing and mana potions. They are also good at fighting and can help the player a lot. I kinda like this feature, because it brings more "life" to the game. Graphics The game has a comic styled graphic-style which is combined with quite a lot of blood and (exaggerated) gore. Combined with the good soundtrack the game creates a coherent atmosphere. The graphics are not the best, but that is not important in any way. Everything looks good with good architecture and nice artstyle. The places/ worlds you travel trough are really, REALLY well done. There are not only dungeons, but whole "worlds" that wait to be explored which are filled with nice places that are worth to be looked at. Sometimes textures are a little bit muddy, but this is not a big deal to me. Story If you want a story-driven game, don't buy Torchlight II. I don't remember a thing from its' story besides that there is a train looking "alchemist" wanting to destroy the world. Seriously: for me the story is not important in a hack'n'slash game. Other things One of the most awesome things the game has is the workshop implementation. The community has published TONS of mods that reach from a different UI, a Half Life headcrab as a pat to new dungeons and weapons. With this feature the game will get lots of FREE content. CONLUSION You can let several hundred hours flow into Torchlight II because of the HUGE amound of mods. Its' gameplay is good and the game does not get too easy. There is a multiplayer but I haven't tried it out. The story connects the different places, but is not important at all. The game is MUCH better than its' predecessor. It does not require a constant internet connection and I had much fun with it. It isn't very expensive so give it a try!