Torchlight II Previews
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Eurogamer:
Most of the game is immediately familiar to players of the first Torchlight, but unfortunately this means your pet still looks like something of an afterthought, much as it did in the original. The animal that tags along, be it bird or bulldog, is never particularly distinctive and is still most useful as a pack-horse, shunting supplies back and forth, saving you from having to haul your plunder home yourself every ten minutes.
I couldn't care about my pet getting hurt because I knew it would never die, and I didn't care about what it did in combat because I couldn't direct it well enough anyway. In fact, whenever it killed something for me, I ended up feeling a little bit cheated. I wasn't able to notice any difference between the different breeds I could select and eventually decided that, as long as they hauled my stuff home and didn't make my PC shed actual hair, that was all I could ever expect of them. I'm hoping something more is made of this before release.
Now, if I was a smarter writer, I'd have been able to compose this feature entirely from paragraphs that all repeated the same point, but with increasing emphasis and ever more elaborate language. It would be like a jazz improv building around a theme, gradually reaching a crescendo, cleverly echoing the repetition and growing intensity of the game. I'm not that writer, though, and I'd come off like a fool, so instead I'll just say this: It looks like Torchlight 2 really is going to be good at that one thing it does, at being a game where you just bash your way through armies of tougher and tougher monsters, over and over. Though, like jazz, it will probably remain an acquired taste.
eGamer:
Loot wise, well you carry all the equipment you'd expect, though there are some awesome tweaks that just make so much sense. The most obvious example would be the requirements to equip items to your character. In previous games of the genre there was always a worry that favouring specific attributes (like magic for example) on say, your mage, would mean any really good equipment that required even a modest amount of strength would be lost to you. In Torchlight 2 however, each piece of equipment comes with an attribute requirement and a level requirement, and they're mutually exclusive of one another. By that I mean, if you meet the level requirement then you don't need to meet the required attribute; so an item you'd not be able to wear due to your dexterity being too low can now be worn by your embermage when he eventually reaches the required level, that is assuming the attribute required is harder to reach than the level. It's all very well thought out and everything works so well together that you're never really left wanting more from the system.
