![]() Skills are similarly hobbled, their first few levels proving so puny that they’re significantly less useful than your basic attack, and only start to come into their own when they’ve had a lot of skill points lavished on them. Sadly that change left obvious traces, from your customisable home base fort that doesn’t really do very much to a crafting system that’s a similar cul-de-sac, and levelling up that’s often so incremental you can barely tell the difference. Torchlight 3 began life as Torchlight Frontiers, a free-to-play game, which only changed tack relatively late in development to become a paid-for title. The other major issue is with skills and levelling up. The relic and its effect on skills is described in detail but it’s right at the start of the game and, without experience with its systems, it all means very little. Each one has a profound effect on the skills that will be most viable for your character, and ironically many of those synergies, or lack thereof, only become apparent quite late in the game. It may not be flagged as such, but this is a dangerous moment, because while you’ll continually swap out your pets, once you’ve chosen a relic you can never change it. You start by choosing a class, a pet, and a magical relic. On your own the robot and tank are likely to be your best bets, although the game’s pretty good at letting you get away with any of the four as a solo endeavour. The character classes offer you a Dusk Mage, who uses light and dark magical attacks the Forged, which is a robot that fires hot coals from a hatch in its chest the tanky Railmaster who attacks with a giant mallet and the long range Sharpshooter. Exploring feels good, even if the overworld is a strictly linear corridor of dungeons and locations, a feature lightly obscured by frequent meanderings and dead ends.Īlthough the game is once again playable in four-player co-op it’s perfectly viable in single player. Even the bosses are cute and multi-coloured, their explosive attacks lighting up the charming isometric scenery. Its colour palette is brighter and sparklier than most dungeon crawlers, with enemies that look and sound like tiny, fun little cartoons rather than terrifying monsters. Torchlight 3 looks, sounds, and – superficially at least – plays much like its predecessors. Unfortunately, shortly after that developer, Runic Games shut down, leaving the third instalment to a brand new team. The first outing was a mid-budget Diablo clone with a more light-hearted approach and the same loot loving heart, while Torchlight 2, which came out at the same time as Diablo 3, actually managed to be considerably better and more complete than its inspiration at launch. The Torchlight franchise has had a strange history. The indie alternative to Diablo, that beat Blizzard at its own game, gets a new sequel with some new ideas about how to advance the genre. Torchlight 3 – new sequel, new problems (pic: Perfect World)
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