In Torchlight III, it’s been a century since the events of Torchlight II, and the Ember Empire is in decline. Novastraia is again under threat of invasion against the Netherim and its allies. To defeat the Netherim threat, adventurers must choose to party up with three fellow adventurers via online cooperative multiplayer or venture alone to fight their way to find fame, glory and new adventures through a vibrant world filled with hordes of dangerous creatures waiting at every turn.
Torchlight III Early Access game features include:
Travel the Frontier: Players can explore the wilderness, party with friends, gather materials to craft loot, or show off their spoils in town! There’s always something to do in the new frontier.
Build & Upgrade Your Fort: It’s time to rebuild! Players will enjoy their very own account-based fort, where they can upgrade gear, and make renovations to show it off to their friends and the world. The game allows them to build monuments of power, pet stables, and more!
Choose a Relic: Relics are objects of great power that grant players a suite of active skills and passive skills. Players can craft them, level them up and store them in their fort. The relic is an important part of a character's strategy - choose wisely!
Collect Epic Gear: Whether it's armor, weapons, recipes, ember cores, or even new pets ... there's always more to find as adventurers battle through dungeons and take on dangerous foes. Every randomly-generated area can be replayed over and over again since each instance brings different items.
Pets are Back: Players can fight their way to fame and glory with loyal companions! Each of the many species comes in a myriad of colors and styles so adventurers shouldn’t settle for the first one they find. They can also make these pets stronger by adding skills, equip them with gear to make them hardier, and together battle enemies as a team.
Build Your Hero: With four classes to choose from, players can utilize class-specific mechanics to maximize damage and their odds of survival. Torchlight III lets them gather epic gear, select your Relic powers, and customize loadouts to create a unique combat style for their heroes.
Torchlight III features four diverse hero classes with unique abilities and powers:
The Dusk Mage is an enchanter who harnesses the power of light and dark energy to conjure devastating attacks.
The Forged is a powerful robot who relies on an arsenal of weaponry to build up heat and unleash explosive assaults.
The Railmaster is a locomotive savvy powerhouse who steams into combat with a massive hammer and heavily armed battle train.
The Sharpshooter is a powerful and nimble ranged character who uses incredible skill with ranged weapons and magical trinkets to take on enemies from afar.
Torchlight III is the latest successor to the ARPG cult classics, Torchlight I and II, originally developed by Runic Games. This fast-paced dungeon crawler brings fans back to the beloved Torchlight universe to hack and slash their way through a brand new world filled with hordes of goblins, undead and other dangerous Netherim creatures.
Originally released on Steam Early Access June 13th and with a further end game update (Fazeer Shah’s Dun-Djinn) on the 23rd, the game has been the subject of mixed user reviews over the last month.
I've been playing quite a bit over the last week and have also played the previous Torchlight games on PC, Switch and Console many times. ARPG's are one of my personal favourite genres, so does Torchlight 3 live up to the expectations benchmarked by its prequels? Or does it fall short?
Quite honestly I've really enjoyed my time with this game so far, its without a doubt a Torchlight game.
The graphics are beautiful and vibrant with wonderful ability effects. The new characters are all uniquely different and equally fun to play. The tongue in cheek quests and setting mask a well balanced and mechanically sound ARPG framework; working tirelessly in the background to provide a slick gaming experience.
A lot of the criticism levelled at the game is that it has become over-simplified in this latest iteration, "Torchlite" if you will.
However that wasn't really my finding at all. While a competent and respected entry into the ARPG genre, Torchlight has never really taken itself too seriously, its always been about fun and accessibility. That theme continues with Torchlight 3, it's instantly familiar to anyone who has played the previous games, or indeed, any ARPG.
The Skill trees are different this time around, but the two distinct character trees coupled with the new relic tree and various loot sets and attributes make for plentiful customization and character builds. At no point did I feel restricted or forced into a meta build and experimentation was always fun and often rewarding. As a gameplay comparison it felt I had more flexibility to create a build than say, in a game like Destiny 2.
I'm reviewing Torchlight 3 in it's Early Access, so things are bound change and be added/tweaked, but in its current form, my criticisms would be as follows:
The game is currently only playable online in multiplayer, although Single Player mode is coming. I found that this occasionally impacted gameplay by causing large lag spikes as other players joined and left, or even general input lag while playing with some.
I experienced frequent disconnects when returning to town or to my fort. While loading into these particular sections, the game would then often throw up a "disconnected" error screen.
It's fast enough to load back in and no progress was ever lost, but it was a little annoying nonetheless.
The initial stages are a little grindy, while I understand this may be to acclimatize players new to the genre, it was all a little linear, repetitive and too easy. This doesn't last for too long (maybe 2-3 hours) then the game picks up. Its also worth noting you can change the difficulty level, which also automatically matches you with other players on the same difficulty setting.
Combat can feel a little sluggish or clunky due to the fact that most of the abilities leave you stationary, only able to rotate and not to move and activate like a twin stick.
While this feels quite natural for a more tanky character like the forged, it feels a little anomalous for the more agile classes.
In summary, I would definitely recommend the game, even in early access, to any ARPG fans or to anyone who enjoyed the previous outings.
It's extremely accessible and fun to play. It's also a perfect game to dip in and out of to enjoy during a short break, without the need to set aside time for a lengthy gaming session. It doesn't really do anything to push the genre or reinvent itself, but it's a successful formula so why should it?
Currently the game takes around 20-30 hours and with the latest patch has further replayability in endgame.
You can check out the game on Steam here.
There's also more information on the Torchlight 3 Website
Or Follow them on Twitter @PlayTorchlight
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