Torchlight II

Like the original Torchlight, Torchlight II features randomly generated dungeons for the player to explore, and numerous types of monsters to fight for experience and loot. Torchlight II maintains the same basic gameplay as its predecessor, but features overland areas with multiple hub towns, and a longer campaign. Other new features include time of day cycles, weather effects, and a redesigned user interface. Also unlike the first game, some weapons and armor can only be used by certain classes, as opposed to all of them.

With the ability to pursue different unique builds and customize the almost unlimited number of spells, gear, and weapons it leads to intricate fights. The exploration is wide and vast with large quantities of different landscapes. You can make combinations of gear that support your class abilities or choose to try to make tricky strategies to outplay your enemies. Players are able to customize character appearance with choice of sex, face, hair style and hair color.

Years after the end of the original Torchlight, The Alchemist (one of the three playable characters in the first game) becomes corrupted by the Ember Blight coming from the Heart of Ordrak, the evil being who had been the source of the corruption under the town of Torchlight, and then destroys the town. The player character takes on a quest to stop this villain, who is using Ordrak's power to disturb the balance between the world's six elements.

As the game progresses, the player treks across large geographical areas, corresponding to three "acts" of the story and an epilogue. Act I, Wake of the Alchemist, is set in the mountainous Estherian Steppes, and Act II takes the player to a desert known as the Mana Wastes, and Act III takes place in Grunnheim, a haunted forest that contains the ruins of an ancient dwarven civilization. An Imperial Camp serves as the player's town.

Prior to the release of the first game, Runic Games had announced plans to develop a MMORPG set in the Torchlight game world to follow the release of the single player game. However, in August 2010, Runic announced they were developing Torchlight II, a sequel which was conceived not only as a way to give the series multiplayer support, but also to give Runic "more experience with making a multiplayer Torchlight." Some of the work on Torchlight II is intended to carry over to Runic Games' upcoming Torchlight MMORPG, which the company plans to focus on following the release of the sequel. Runic Games originally estimated the PC version's release date to be sometime in 2011, but in November 2011 company president Travis Baldree announced the game release date would be pushed back to 2012 to allow time for further polishing and beta testing.

In late 2010, Runic Games' increased involvement in the Xbox Live Arcade port of the first Torchlight game caused a delay in the development of the sequel, but memory and loading time optimizations developed for the port led to improvements in the PC version of Torchlight II.

Torchlight II received favorable reviews; on aggregate review website Metacritic the game attains an overall score of 88 out of 100 based on reviews from 67 professional critics.

Game Informer stated that "Torchlight II is an excellent game no matter how you slice it... the margin between [it and Diablo III] is razor-thin – and I have to give the nod to Torchlight II." IGN praised the game saying, "Torchlight II doesn't do anything radically new, but does everything incredibly well. It fits all the pieces of varied monster behavior, interesting items, excellent skill design and random surprises together into a near-perfect formula, where the action never stops and rewards are never far away."