In fairness, I used a developer-sanctioned cheat in that metamorphosis (see sidebar). I flipped my approach to combat on its head more than once in my berserker playthrough, morphing wholesale from a dual-wielding melee machine to a sword-and-board battlemage midway through the third act. A steady drip of new skill unlocks continually puts new tools in your belt, often enabling entirely new tactics. The boss fights are similarly creative, many of which smartly push players out of their comfort zone by punishing or demanding certain strategies or engagement distances. Monsters constantly throw new challenges at you: beasts generate clones by eating corpses, steam-powered automatons spawn lightning-spewing gyrocopters, and mushroom mages create mana-draining void zones. No matter where you are or what skill and equipment loadout you build, Torchlight II is never boring. Fifteen or so hours later, with the final boss dead at your feet, about 50 levels under your belt, and an inventory full of powerful magical gear, you’re ready to enter the Mapworks with its unique and randomly generated challenges or start over in new game plus. Monsters explode in showers of loot and experience points, but not until they’ve demonstrated their own pyrotechnic tricks.

The camera remains centered on your hero as you click around the field to move, attack, and fire off explosive powers that range from launching galleon-sized cannonballs to summoning packs of spectral wolves. Torchlight II’s isometric fantasy/steampunk combat is exactly as expected.

Torchlight II forgoes robust an online infrastructure, instead focusing on delivering amazing action in its loot-rich dungeon crawls and more freedom to build your character than anything in recent memory. Beating Blizzard is an awfully high bar to be set before a game is even out, but the team at Runic Games can hang with the big boys. The question was whether it was going to compete with or even beat Diablo III at its own game. Nobody paying attention to PC gaming over the last year was concerned about whether Torchlight II was going to be good (it is).

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