Torchlight

Few times I have wished I had an entry of the first Knights of the Old Republic on this blog as I would've liked to check what I thought about it. No post can be found of Torchlight either. I guess I played them both before I started this or for some other reason didn't just write about them.

Nevertheless, as Torchlight II is coming out tomorrow and I'm very much getting it, I thought I should play the first game through once more. And afterwards greatly enjoy the sequel, which improves Torchlight in every possible aspect.

Torchlight is an improvement in a somewhat similar fashion as it's basically Fate but better. Torchlight brings in Diablo 2 style skill trees, three character classes, slightly more story elements, and literally more depth to the dungeon levels. And it in general is more polished and looks and plays better.

If you want the game to look even better, you should totally use SorrySoldOut's Texture Project like I did for this playthrough. Seriously, the textures are amazing. I just wish a similar mod was available for TL2 at launch.

Torchlight has been criticized for its easy difficulty. I'm not entirely sure I agree with that. Maybe Normal should be harder, but at least Hard (the suggested difficulty for ARPG veterans, and on which I play) already offers enough challenge. At least to die twice... Bah, maybe it is too easy. On this playthrough I ended up dying 11 times, though. Nine of those deaths happened because of dark zealots.

I did some research and evidently their lightning attack got mistakenly overtuned at some patch. The lightning beam can crit and I was taking ~1.5k hits on my ~2.1k health destroyer, meaning that I basicly got two-shot every time two zealots decided to use their beam at the same time. That certainly slowed down things a bit.

Otherwise, things died pretty quickly. Especially after I got Devastate. It normally hits for few k's and chews pretty effortlessly through anything. The final boss actually has some health, though, and all the armor penalties have time to apply and I was seeing 18k crits. And then it was over as well.

From what I could tell from my experience during the short beta of TL2, I can say that it's at least somewhat harder. Though it was no where near as difficult as TotalBiscuit's videos might make you believe. I think I might try the hardest setting right from the start.

But yeah. Torchlight -- a great action rpg with few flaws. Torchlight II -- probably better in every way. Except in story; it gets even less engaging. At least in Act 1.

Tomorrow could not come any faster.