Fate: The Traitor Soul

The whole Fate series is sort of a poor man's Torchlight. But it still is something to play while waiting for Torchlight II to come out. Fate: The Traitor Soul -- the second standalone expansion -- is again basically the original game (or the previous installation more precisely) but with more things.

Yet again there's a new dungeon, the Chamber of Trials, placed in the Temple of Fate, and every ten levels or so you get a quest to kill a mob in there. Basically it's just more of the same. There are also new music tracks, pets, items, and you can choose a race of your character. The race choice mostly means that the start of the game will be easier if you choose to play with the style you've gained bonuses for. Later on the bonuses to skills cease to mean much, alike to Dungeon Siege II.

I don't know if it was because of the new dungeon or because I played a caster this time but it took me about five hours longer to beat FTS than Fate: Undiscovered Realms. I died a lot less, though. Only thrice in fact and those three deaths happened only because I was trying to cast identify instead of heal. Fate has a similar system to Diablo II in setting hotkeys for spells. Too bad I discovered it only when I had played about third of the game.

I thought the active spell icon was only for show before I accidentally took the cursor over it and found that right clicking it pops up your known spells. Previously I had been changing the active spell via the spellbook. Needless to say, switching spells became much smoother after setting hotkeys for them.

The spellcasting skill that increases your cast speed becomes obsolete once you start socketing your gear with +x% cast speed gems. Instead, you're better off just increasing the attack, charm, and defense magic skills. The attack magic is probably the most important, unless you want to really improve the strength of your summons with the charm magic skill.

Offensive spells scale pretty well with the skill and your magic score. Staves have strength as a secondary stat requirement and you probably want to throw a handful of points into vitality as well to avoid random enemy projectiles one-shotting you. Otherwise it's pretty straightforward and at least on Adventurer difficulty my character became pretty much a walking tactical nuke, bombarding the screen with meteor strikes.

There are few mobs that are completely immune to magic and will slow you down for the time it takes you to whack them dead with your slow attack speed staff and the aid of your pet. Also, I wish area of effect spells would break barrels and chests. Smashing them open with the staff becomes a real chore.

Fate: The Traitor Soul doesn't really add enough on top of Undiscovered Realms to justify playing the game through again. I did that anyway but towards the end I was getting pretty tired of it. There is a third standalone expansion as well, Fate: The Cursed King, released earlier this year. However, I might just wait for Runic Games to release TL2 rather than touch another Fate game, even though the trial evidently allows you to play through the game twice before buying.