Fate

Fate (or FATE) is the game Travis Baldree made before Torchlight (I think he worked on Mythos between them), and if you've played the latter, you will find Fate very similar. In fact, they are almost the same game, Torchlight is just an improved version.

Where Torchlight has at least some kind of story, Fate really has none; your main quest is to descend to dungeon level 48 and kill some guy there (in-style of a basic roguelike). 48 seems a bit random but I'd guess it has something to do with the playtime -- it took just slightly less than 12 hours for me to beat the game.

All the dungeon levels are generated randomly, rotating between few (five or so) different themes. I was hoping the level 48 and the "last" boss would be something like in Torchlight, but I guess I should have known they were no different than any other level/named monster. Albeit the guy *was* surrounded by a whole score of other named monsters.

Fate offers four different difficulty levels: Page, Adventurer, Hero, and Legend. Adventurer is the default and I thought the game might be as easy as Torchlight so I picked Hero. I decided to make a swords dual-wielding character and put my skill points into Sword, Critical Strike, and Dual-Wielding skills.

Soon enough I found that the game was extremely hard. (!) I was dying constantly and/or returning to the Town of Grove to buy more potions. To wield swords, you have to have high enough strength and dexterity. However, high defense armor requires high strength, which I never seemed to have enough. And as I didn't have a shield, I was getting hit constantly. Also, the dual-wielding skill isn't very cost effective, offering only a little gain per point spent.

So, I started a new character (on Adventurer) and decided to go with axes instead as they (usually) require only Strength. This time, instead of going right with two weapons I used a shield for a while. It worked pretty well, and playing became enjoyable. At some point, though, I switched to two axes and stuff got slightly hard again.

Then around half way through the game, I found two very expensive random items (that were no use to me), and pow; I suddenly had over three million gold to spent. So, I visited the enchanter dude, Luck was a lady, and the rest of the game was a walk in the park. Evidently, enough life-stealing and attack speed increasing gems make dual-wielding worthwhile, and good weapons, of course.

Like Torchlight, there is fishing, which gives you fish (surprise!) to feed to your pet and sometimes even valuable items. However, I didn't stop my dungeon crawling even once to do that -- I did enough in-game fishing in WoW:WotLK for one lifetime.

Fate is also one of those games you can play on your netbook (like I did) as the system requirements are minimal. It actually runs better than Diablo 2 on my Acer Aspire One 532 -- fps doesn't drop to single digits when the screen is filled with mobs.

I wish Fate had gone more D2 style with its skills (like Torchlight). Some special abilities would have been cool. I did leave the spellcasting part of the game totally unexplored, though. Thus partly my own fault for not seeing cool effects.