Its speed and ease of access just make the compulsive gameplay loop a lot more apparent, and a lot more compelling, than most other RPGs of its kind.

This is to say that Torchlight II, in every sense of its design, is a carrot on a stick. It wants to keep the player locked into the power fantasy of killing monsters, getting stronger, and pushing forward – and it’s discarded anything which does not directly contribute to this end. There are a lot of things missing from Torchlight (namely a deep story, advanced skills, a complex player stats system, overworld puzzles, etc.) but each of these things is in its own way inessential to the experience this game wants to be. Polish simplifies things, it removes the chaff of the experience and keeps the remaining package laser-focused. When I say that Torchlight II’s design is polished, its design philosophy is really a double-edged sword. It’s just plain and simple: kill, loot, upgrade, repeat. You’ll never need to figure out where to go, or solve any tedious puzzles, or do any fetch quests.

The game is extremely kinetic – you’ll receive a very small amount of quests and all of them have simple objectives and clear waypoint markers. It’s modeled after Blizzard’s Diablo II and WildTangent’s PC game Fate (anyone remember that one?), in that it offers a rapidly looping cycle of killing monsters, picking up loot, upgrading characters and then killing stronger monsters. Torchlight II is, mechanically, a simple action RPG. It’s a fantastic port too – this is a game which greatly benefits from portability, and being able to share the experience. None of us expected Panic Button to take the game to current-generation consoles, much less the Nintendo Switch. The studio’s two action RPG titles were examples of impeccable polish – immensely playable, worked well in short bursts or long sessions, solo or in a party, and were compulsive like nothing else on the market. When Runic Games sadly closed its doors in 2017, we all thought we’d seen the end of the Torchlight franchise.

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