Welcome to the Better Late Then Never series. Basically it will be me looking at games that I have missed or put off long after release. While it may be old news is old to some, there is value in bringing up good games that I just got around to playing. Never know there might be one or two you forgot about. The first game up on the block is Torchlight 2. Not really that old, but one I put off due to the massive amount of time I spent in Guild Wars 2

I bought the original Torchlight on a lark really. I had heard all the dirty gossip that it was just a Diablo I clone. Internally I thought what the hell is wrong with that? Runic games made a solid dungeon wrecking game that I spent months playing. So when the sequel was announced my radar was locked in hard. Well until GW2 knocked all games off the map. I have only played about four hours according to Steam. So this will be a quick impression post.

Right out of the gate I ran into the first problem with the game. Thankfully it was the only problem. For some reason with both Torchlight’s intro scenes the audio kept cutting in and out. I was to lazy to figure out why. Still the intro tells you what you need to know and off you run to save the world from things. If you followed the story of the first one at all, you’ll understand what is going on.

First thing I noticed is how the the world is in the style of Diablo II and III. It’s also a lot like the first Dungeon siege. I was happy to see it personally. To much dungeon crawling gets on my nerves after a while. So over world maps to clobber is always welcome. I am going with the outlander class the first time through. No clue whether there will be a play through with any other classes. Class selection is improved with Torchlight 2. The lineup is Beserker, Outlander, Ember Mage and Engineer. Similar to the original, but with some nice upgrades.

The graphics and controls appear to be refined, but basically unchanged from the original. Runic appeared to go with the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it approach. I can respect that, as the first game was fine from where I sit. Runs great on my middle of the road machine and I turned the settings up fairly high. The only thing they didn’t change was the map style. A small point, but one that rubs me wrong. I wish they had stepped away from the diabloish style on that. Finally lets take a quick look at combat.

The combat remains virtually unchanged, except for the unique class abilities. Which means I will spend my time over running targets and running into hordes I didn’t mean to. That is not really the games fault. I get way to click happy and forget to hit control every bloody time. Beside that I have no complaint. Since I am so early in the game I can’t wait to see what higher level abilities my character has to rain death on enemies.

This is the easiest summation of an impressions post ever. If you liked Torchlight I then odds are good you will like the sequel. I suspect that like last time I will spend a couple hours here and there until finally beating the game a year later. That is what happened with the first game and isn’t a bad thing at all.