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To see this content please enable targeting cookies. If I didn’t already know the path it had taken, I’d have spent my entire time playing the game being gnawed at by wondering just what it was that made it all feel so off. Torchlight III feels an awful lot like what it is: a free-to-play multiplayer game that thought better of itself, and decided to become a proper full-price microtransaction-free primarily solo release. One is "This should be fun." The other is "Let's make it interesting." I couldn't help but hear both as the ignored voice of a quiet developer at the back of a Torchlight III planning meeting. It just feels clunky and irritating.Torchlight 3 is an action RPG haunted by the ghost of the F2P game it almost was, and lacks any clear idea of what game it actually wants to be.Īt the end of the first of three acts in Torchlight III, there's a boss character who repeats two of the same barks over and over. If I’m firing my bow and need to quickly dodge roll out of an explosion, I have to stop everything I’m doing and press the button frantically until it becomes responsive. That means you have to finish any ongoing animations and wait around a second – which may as well be a decade in some of these encounters. The most frustrating part of Torchlight 3’s combat, which I still haven’t stopped fuming over, is the fact that almost none of the active abilities can be triggered unless you’ve come to a complete stop. Every corner is filled with destructible and interactable items, small but effective embellishments, and mood-setting lighting and effects which ensures no map ever feels too static or lifeless. Whether it’s a stalwart military outpost ringed with fireable cannons or a murky swamp brimming with poisonous beasts, the simple, colorful, readable art style pops and sizzles. Playing on Hard, the difficulty felt just about right.The environments you’ll explore and do battle in are excellently constructed, too. The bigger area and act bosses are a highlight, offering substantial challenges and keeping me on my toes with deadly area attacks. There are powerful elite creatures with randomized ability modifiers, as well as legendary and miniboss bruisers packed with rare loot for your trouble.
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Occasionally you’ll run into tricker enemies, like wild boars that can take you out in just a couple of hits with a charge attack. You’ll blast through hordes of weakling goblins, bugs, and zombies. The enemy design is respectable, but doesn’t offer much that’s new and exciting if you’ve been around the ARPG block a few times. But it encourages experimentation and helps my builds feel like they’re mine. The Relic skill trees still feel fairly limited, just like the base class ones, with most having two active and two passive abilities that can be upgraded in a couple different ways. A mage with vampiric berserker abilities? Nothing is stopping you. Each relic is class agnostic, so you can mix and match them to create interesting combinations. You can have one Relic equipped at a time, which opens up an entirely new skill tree that includes an “ultimate” ability with a very long cooldown, similar to those you might see in a MOBA. “It gets a little more exciting with the introduction of Relics, which ended up being my favorite part of the progression system.
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It’s got a certain charm to it, but it’s all so painfully familiar, like your slacker roommate’s first attempt at running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. You’ve got goofy goblins that lean on the comedy crutches of over-the-top voice acting and Saturday morning cartoon hijinks. Every NPC seems to be defined by a single personality archetype. It’s not like previous Torchlight games were heavy on story either, but Torchlight 3 doesn’t even seem to be trying. Something about an ancient evil reawakening, blah blah blah. Torchlight 3 doesn’t put its best foot forward as it tries to introduce us to a story premise that isn’t really trying to be anything more than ultra generic fantasy. When I could be playing Diablo 3 or Wolcen (now that it's been patched a bit) or Path of Exile or even one of the older Torchlight games, I keep looking for a reason why I’d choose Torchlight 3… and so far, the early access version hasn’t really given me one. The problem is that it doesn’t really do much to effectively set itself above or apart from the embarrassment of riches we have to pick from in this genre right now.
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It’s a flashy, bombastic, nicely-paced action-RPG with tons of enemies to slash, blast, and explode for the tasty loot inside. There’s nothing desperately wrong with Torchlight 3, which just came out in Early Access form a week ago.