Torchlight II Previews

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Written by BuckGB on May 15th, 2012

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One of the most beloved aspects of the original Torchlight was the players pet. That trusted companion that followed you into Hell's Dungeons with a smile on its face and your enemies blood as its sustenance. In Torchlight 2, your pets have become even more awesome. As in the first game, pets can eat fish and turn into horrible monsters, they can attack your enemies, store your items, equip their own gear, and venture into town to sell your worthless junk items. However, a tiny feature has been added that I personally think is incredible. So, you've stocked your pet up with your unwanted loot to sell, and you notice that you're running low on health potions. In the original, this meant teleporting back to town, but not in Torchlight 2. You can command your pet to buy things for you when you send them to town. You give your pet a shopping list. Simple, genius and an amazing feature. This means that you're free to continue bashing skulls and smearing brains, whilst your pet goes ahead and does your menial chores for you.

The best improvement that Torchlight 2 offers over the original, is the addition of multiplayer. Co-op and social interaction in Torchlight 2 is seamless. The developers really did listen to their fans. Chatting, accessing your friends list, emotes, trading and joining a game is super easy to do. Clicking on a persons name in-game gives a dropdown to select these, and a huge game server list allows you to find games from the co-op menu. The co-op is stunning in Torchlight 2, with the players' skills complementing each other, and allowing some very interesting and fun tactical moments. The loot in co-op is all instanced, so no one can come along and ninja your precious epics or gold a very nice feature that a lot of multiplayer dungeon crawlers miss.

The playable characters have also seen a substantial overhaul, having been reworked and expanded from three classes to four. The mage and ranger analogies return, renamed to Embermage and Outlander respectively. The melee class has now been split into two, the heavy weapons technology-based expert called the Engineer and the speedy animalistic Berkserker class.

In the original game there was no customisability to your characters outside of the loot you find and equip. Here, you can now choose the gender, hairstyle, hair colour and face of your avatar. There are also more options when it comes to your pet companion with new animals and various skins available. A panther, bulldog, hawk and papillon dog supplement the wolf, lynx, ferret and chakawary from the first game.

Matt Uelmen returns as the game's composer; he was also responsible for the music of the previous two Diablo games, which was also why the previous installment's music sounded so familiar. But this time around, Uelmen has departed from the sounds that made Torchlight's music seem like a homage to the Diablo series, and makes Torchlight II's soundtrack really stand on its own as it mood-swings between somber and dreary to pure excitement. Uelman's famous guitar pieces set nicely into the new arrangements giving the music the otherworldly familiarity that we've come to know, but not so much that it sounds like a continuation of his works from Diablo.

The user interface has received some functional improvements as well by moving the inventory, attribute and skill tree menu buttons to the side of the screen unobtrusively so as to free up real estate in the center console. This allows for a more streamlined look, while giving new users a quick way to navigate to these menus, while achieving a balance that won't hamper those familiar with the game. If you've played the Xbox 360 version, the UI looks very similar, although more functionality is available than the console, which was limited by the lack of buttons.

I played as an Outlander, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. With the deadly combination of dual-wielding pistols, a glaive to bounce off multiple enemies and a pet to distraction them, I screamed through the levels. In fact it all seemed to happen almost too quickly, and frankly it appeared to be unbalanced. However eventually I realized there's a balance to all the chaos, and it's meant to be this furious. The player is rewarded with five attribute points and one skill point for each level. There are 4 attributes to drop points into: Focus, Magic, Dexterity and Strength. The skill tree for each character appears to be mostly unique (some skills were not present and marked with a gigantic (?)), and there are three tabs in each tree. I noticed one of my Outlander's ability went 15 points deep!

I'd probably recommend people who are interested in even the slightest of challenge to play on Veteran difficulty, because I didn't die once. That doesn't mean I wasn't running low on health as I dodged boss attacks, but I do think some additional challenge outside of those circumstances would be recommended for most players.

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