It’s been a decade since the original Torchlight came out. 2012 saw the original release of its sequel, and finally in 2019 we can play Torchlight 2 away from a PC. Torchlight was a game I sunk a lot of hours into, delving deeper underneath the titular city of Torchlight. At the time it was a great Diablo-style game that scratched that Action RPG itch. It introduced some really handy mechanics that reduced the amount of busy work, along with bringing a neat visual style.

Torchlight 2 was released months after Diablo 3 initially came out, and it felt like the more flexible Action RPG. In the seven years following, Diablo 3 has grown and changed to be a much better game than what they put out at launch. Torchlight 2 was great at the time and is still great today. But now Diablo 3 has been out for some time, is Torchlight 2 late to the party?

Following on from the events of the original Torchlight, the Ember blight sickness and its cause is thought to be defeated. Once one of the heroes, the Alchemist from the original game is wreaking havoc and it is time for new heroes to step up and save the world. There is a story, but it doesn’t really matter 90% of the time. Although some emotional impact is somewhat diminished if you haven’t played the first game. Although you’ll still be alright If you have never played the first game, you can easily leap into the sequel and pick up the terms and piece together what happened. Like Diablo it’s really about the fighting, the powers and the loot, and there is plenty of all three.

Strangely enough, the starting Class selection is one of the game’s few stumbles. It fails to give any information about what the class does or will be able to do. You can pick between the Tank-like Engineer, Magically-focused Embermage, Close combat Berserker, and Guns a blazing Outlander. Although the game won’t even tell you that much, it doesn’t take long to be able to check the skills menu and get some idea what kind of class they are. If it doesn’t gel with you then thankfully it’s easy to start a new character. Once you spend some time with your character, you’ll also find there is flexibility in the classes. They can all use skills that can take them at least two different ways. For example, I chose to use the Engineer for this run. You can either make them a heavy hitting melee tank, or devastate some creatures with heavy duty cannon blasts. Then there’s whether you want to lean into making them proficient with support bots or turn yourself into an unstoppable powerhouse on your own. Although the flexibility only goes so far, if you get further in the game and realise that you’ve sunk your points in skill trees but you’d rather spend on more recently unlocked skills, you can only respec the last 3 points. More recent games have been much more generous with how you can distribute your points, it’s a shame that it hasn’t been implemented here.

The different regions of Torchlight 2 are all big open world areas, randomised with events dotted across the map. You can be sent on a quest to a nearby dungeon, get to a smaller map to solve a maze, save citizens, and kill a lot of evil creatures. It’s nice that the map can be different for different playthroughs.

Pets was an element of Torchlight that I was a big fan of. Who wouldn’t want a Ferret called Lennox who can take all your junk items back to town, or pick up portal or identification scrolls. There’s a good selection of animal/creature varieties including console exclusive ones, in this case the Switch has a unicorn. You can even have them help attack with you, and if you catch the right fish you’ll be able to turn your pet into various monsters. You can even teach them spells to make them a real force to be reckoned with. With the amount of loot across the Torchlight games, the pet is a companion that should’ve been in every Action RPG since 2009.

With a game like this where you’re tackling large groups of enemies, it’s important that the game’s performance can hold up. To this end Torchlight 2 holds up, ideally a game as old as this should, but there’s been plenty of others that haven’t. The game still retains its cartoonish visuals and the environments are varied enough. Regardless of which mode you play, the game runs well as you turn large groups of enemies into exploding chunks of meat without skipping a beat.

If you enjoy the loot aspect to action RPG’s, you’ll find yourself neck deep in items. If anything, it can feel you’re having to spend as much time fighting as you do sorting through your inventory. It’s not exactly an issue I can direct just at Torchlight 2, when every Action RPG is riddled with loot. It is handy that you can easily tell if a piece of clothing/armour is stronger, although you’ll have to compare them to make sure you’re not losing any enhancements. I know I held onto lower level boots for many hours into the game because they added so much to my stats. As with other games of this type, you of course have your stash back at the home base in case you need more than 100 items, as well as a shared stash. I one day hope to find an item so good for another class that I can hand over without it being immediately rendered useless.

Another big component of Torchlight 2 is being able to play it with others. You can even see if your friends are playing it. It shouldn’t even need attention drawn to that fact, but you never know when a game hits the Switch. You can play co-op locally, but if you want to play along with anyone outside of your immediate area you’re going to need Nintendo Online. Multiplayer is a great way to play through the game if you can, and the price makes it an easier sell to friends.

While Torchlight 2 is still stuck back in 2012 in some ways, it was a very enjoyable game back then and after a fair few years away it is still as great! It’s hard to talk about this game without mentioning Diablo, especially Diablo 3. At least two of the creators of Diablo and Diablo 2 made Torchlight and managed to improve on the genre at the time. Now after having a fair few years with both sequels out Diablo 3 really expanded on the end game content and made plenty of improvements from its shaky launch. Torchlight 2 hasn’t changed that much in that time, which means the endgame is still finite unless you want to replay at higher difficulties and lacks some quality of life improvements. Although don’t take this to be negative, the series never saw the still ongoing support that the Diablo series does and is still a blast to play now. It also helps that you’re getting a solid action RPG with well over 20 hours of gameplay for over half the price of the biggest competitor. I don’t like to put too much focus on a price of a game unless there’s something egregious about it. This game is seriously good value!

Torchlight 2 finally gets the wider audience it deserves on consoles, with the added bonus of another fun action RPG on the Switch. To top it all off it is available at a good price compared to its competitor and feels just as good to play. Can only cross our fingers and hope that whatever Torchlight the future holds in store will continue on the Switch.