Torchlight

Torchlight isn't so much a successor to Diablo as it is a successor to Fate, and many of Torchlight's core elements can be seen as being a natural evolutionary progression of those seen in Fate, like the pet. That being said, Torchlight made feel the same way about the Diablo/lone player ARPG genre that Dungeon Siege did with CRPGs- that a game had come along taking many of the little jagged and niggling rough points of its genre, ironing and smoothing them out. You now had a useful and credible companion with you in the dungeon who was more than just cannon fodder. Magical item modification and gem management were no longer awkward and clunky. Character classes had truly interesting abilities and skill progression even allowed for intriguing combinations of classes and abilities. Torchlight is a very streamlined and very thoroughly-perfected ARPG. Yet, for all of its strong points, and for its excellent aesthetic, good sound design and nice soundtrack, it still is an ARPG. For fans of the genre, it's arguably one of the most important games to come out since Diablo II, and it's a total must-have. For people turned off by the genre's repetitiveness and complete lack of any narrative beyond "KILL KILL KILL", it won't be making any converts. Still, for what it is, there's no disputing that Torchlight is an excellent game.

I first got torchlight on a Steam sale a few summers back, thinking that it would be something i played for 2 hours and would be done with. Boy was i wrong. This game was the first game in the ARPG top-down style that i played and i instantly fell in love with it. It has a good length campaign and afterwards an 'infinite dungeon' that you can traverse in order to level up and keep on the search for loot. Also the game is massively moddable and they improve upon the already excellent experience. Absolutely fantastic game.

Torchlight is an action RPG, the genre that Diablo invented. It's loot drops, socketing, silly quests and endless, procedurally generated dungeons, just as you'd expect. It has three things that make it worth your notice: 1. The execution is perfect. Art design, mechanics, difficulty scaling, monster variation, the interface, everything is polished and refined. 2. It will run on nearly any computer made/built in the last five years. You want a good game to play on a notebook with integrated Intel graphics? This will run. It even has a "Netbook mode" to accommodate particularly weedy computers. 3. It's fun. Lots of fun. Addictive, silly, entertaining fun. It came out of left field a few years ago and took over my free time for quite a while.

Well it's no Diablo, I'm afraid. I have difficulty explaining exactly why, though. There's relatively little obviously wrong with Torchlight; the controls are intuitive, the gamplay reasonable, the voice-acting bearable (which is itself far from a garuantee in computer games in general). It's alright for a little while, but I couldn't muster the interest to finish it. It fails to create an immersive atmosphere as well as Diablo. Everything's a little too cutesey and the characters are largely 0 or 1-dimensional. The skilltrees seem somehow pointless; it doesn't seem to matter much how you invest your skillpoints, especially since the game is so easy on Normal difficulty (I strongly suggest starting on "Very Hard" actually, if you have any sort of experience with this kind of game). There also almost no penalty for dying, at any level, which reinforces a general sense of pointlessness. The game is also more-or-less totally linear, with each level of the dungeon following the previous one, and the aesthetic only changing every few levels. One can technically go on "side quests", accessed via teleporting maps from the main village, but these feel even more pointless than the main plot, since they have no objective beyond "find some treasure". All in all, probably just about worth the money if you're desparate for this kind of diablo-esque game, but I wouldn't get it with terrible high expectations.