Still, Torchlight II's terrific enemy variety keeps you on your toes, and its frequent boss fights make for exciting climaxes to each leg of your journey. You see outlines of yourself and enemies through walls, but it's not a good substitute for an unobstructed view. Additionally, architecture can occasionally block the camera. However, on occasion, things get out of hand, and the action can start to chug when the screen fills with enemies. Torchlight II's steady onslaught of enemies is usually enjoyable to manage. (If you crave a greater challenge, you can jump right into the veteran or elite difficulties, and you can activate Hardcore mode, in which death is permanent, on any difficulty setting.) You can have up to 13 skills at your fingertips, and combat situations may motivate you to draw on many of them, as you face ethereal wolves and warriors, heavily armored dwarven automatons, and gargoyles that swoop into the air and come crashing back down. The result is that you always feel enormously capable and powerful, but not so powerful that victory is effortless. Whereas the first Torchlight was a bit of a cakewalk on the normal difficulty setting, Torchlight II offers a manageable but satisfying challenge that requires you to make better use of your skills. It's hard not to feel like the hottest embermage around when you're dual-wielding wands in the fiery Twinferno set. You may have long combined the outlander's repulsion hex, which keeps enemies at bay, with his (or her-classes aren't gender-specific in Torchlight II) rapid-fire ability, only to hit level 42 and find that your newly available ability to summon a massive brute opens up effective new skill combination possibilities. Acquiring new skills and finding effective combinations of skills that you enjoy using are big parts of what makes progressing through Torchlight II addictive, and great new skills continue to become available to you quite late in the game.

And of course, as you level up, you earn skill points that let you select and improve an assortment of active and passive skills that complement your character's core fighting style. Inhabited by a spirit wolf and capable of entering a frenzied state, berserkers can leap right into the fray, wildly punching their way through crowds of monsters.Д®ach class has a charge meter that fills up as you deal damage and makes you more powerful, giving you an incentive to get into the thick of the action and keep dishing out the pain. Berserkers are the speediest and craziest of the bunch. Embermages wield the power of the elements, conjuring weapons of pure flame and making shards of ice rain down from the sky. Engineers excel at dealing slow, devastating attacks with massive weaponry, and can whip up healing robots, turrets, and other support machinery. As an outlander, you can use a wide assortment of ranged weapons-bows, pistols, shotguns, and more-to damage enemies from a distance, and you can hurl a spinning glaive that ricochets off of foes. What does have an impact are the classes and their varied abilities. The story is a perfectly adequate excuse to send you slicing, blasting, and casting your way across the land, but it doesn't have much impact on the overall experience. As one of a new set of adventurers seeking fortune and glory, you set off to stop him.

Setting out on a misguided quest, the alchemist has left the town of Torchlight in ruins and cut a swath of destruction across the land. Much like the playable warrior of the first Diablo becoming corrupted by the Lord of Terror in Diablo II, Torchlight II begins with the influence of the evil Ordrak's heart twisting the once-heroic alchemist. Now Playing: Video Review - Torchlight II

By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's

Torchlight ii console experience