Torchlight

Diablo III seems to be a pretty popular topic recently. Blogs I read on the internet are posting about it. People I only tangentially know at work are coming up to me to talk about it. Blizzard still hasn't given a release date so it's just a lot of things getting me excited about nothing at all.

I saw an article title somewhere (in an IGN spam email I think) mentioning something about how Torchlight 2 had missed the boat. It needed to get out before Diablo III or completely lose its market and was recently pushed back for additional testing. It reminded me that I haven't played Torchlight but that my brother gave me a copy of it over Steam for Christmas in 2010. My computer with Steam on it was dead at the time and I was too lazy to install it on my laptop. I was going to fix my computer, honest. And then it slipped my mind completely...

I did eventually get my computer fixed and use Steam to play Civ V. Unfortunately there's nothing in the Steam client to indicate I had an incoming gift so I continued to forget about it... Until the Torchlight 2 article! I tracked down the email with the link and installed the game.

It's most definitely just a Diablo clone, but it's a pretty good one. (Potions, identify scrolls, and town portal scrolls all look the same, for example.) There are some definite improvements over Diablo II (shared stash in town so I can easily trade items between characters in particular) and it's been fun so far. I started as the gun using character but have found it to be a little frustrating. The same button is for walking and for shooting so I frequently find myself walking up beside a monster when I really wanted to shoot it from a distance. Having to accurately click to target things isn't really my thing in a game like this. I pretty much exclusively played the sorceress in Diablo II. Who needs to target a chain lightning? Just fire it off in the general direction of the enemies! If it hits any of them it hits them all! Frozen orb? It hits everything! INFERNO?!? Just run in circles!

That said, I think I'm going to start a different character up. There's a melee dude and a caster as other options. Presumably the melee dude doesn't mind accidentally walking up beside the monsters!