

The ancient dragon Ordrak, who was corrupting the mysterious Ember ore and people who went into contact with it, was defeated. The game is available on Windows, Linux, OS X, and Xbox 360 with further plans from Panic Button to release the title on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.Story and CharactersTorchlight II story takes place some time after events from the first game.

It follows the story of the original title and focuses on the Alchemist – a playable character from the previous game – which now plays the role of the main antagonist led by the corrupting power of the ancient dragon, Ordrak. It is the sequel to Torchlight video game released in 2010. (Want to smelt 25 units of iron? Wait 90 seconds.) That is the sort of system you'd expect to find in a predatory mobile game, and somehow, it's migrated over to a numbered Torchlight sequel.Torchlight 2 is a hack and slash isometric role-playing game developed and published in 2012 by Runic Games. For instance, I installed a smelting pit that allowed me to turn my raw ore into refined metal bars, but it's guarded behind an entirely unnecessary timer. Furthermore, there is a personal fort that you use as the basecamp for all your characters, but some of its systems seem downright incongruous with the game Torchlight 3 claims to be. There are no oddballs to befriend on the road, or eccentric tasks to pick up off the bounty boards, and that leaves the game feeling hollow.

I enter that dungeon, kill a boss, and go back to town to learn that I have a new quest that will grant access to the next named region. The story progression is laughably linear I pick up a quest in town, it asks me to find a dungeon somewhere in a named region. Publisher Perfect World Entertainment changed course earlier this year, making the game a "premium" full-priced piece of software, but the bones of its scrapped identity are everywhere. If you scroll back into the archives, you'll learn that Torchlight 3 (then called Torchlight Frontiers) was announced as a free-to-play product. But I spent most of my time as a "Duskmage," who is saddled with a complicated magic system where you're constantly synergizing spells from both the "light" and "dark" schools, offering a surprisingly high skill ceiling for an ARPG that's always prioritized newcomers to the genre.īut unfortunately, the fundamental soundness of Torchlight 3's combat lacks the infrastructure to support it. You can be a "Railmaster," a barbarian engineer who's followed around by a literal train, which can be augmented with different speciality cars that unload hell on anyone in your way. That attitude is carried over to Torchlight 3's class choices, which throw the D&D rulebook out the window. The world of Novastraia radiates with a rich, playful aesthetic the swirling riptides of the ocean, the rugged pastures of the outer forests, and the gleefully overworked Halloween trim of the graveyards do a great job at grounding the player in this frivolous, folkloric fantasyland. Instead, Torchlight gets by on the elements that have always been the franchise's strengths. There are a few cutscenes and audio recordings to find throughout the main quest, but specifics about the existential threat on the horizon are scarce. Torchlight 3 takes place a century after the events of Torchlight 2, but the narrative is almost entirely ancillary to the core gameplay experience.
