The game takes a couple minutes with a starting cutscene to explain that Novastraia is in danger because of monsters trying to destroy everything.

If you’ve played an action-RPG that involves a lot of demon-slaying, there’s a high chance that you’ve seen this story before. You don’t want to lock yourself into a build that isn’t quite as effective as you know it could be. These skills, and the relic you choose, can’t really be switched out at the throw of a hat, so you’ll want to make your choices carefully.

As you level up, you’ll get points that you can invest in a fairly complex skill tree. electrical powers, allowing it to shock and stun enemies for damage as he moved through the map. Before setting off on your adventure, you get to choose a ‘relic’, which gives your attacks certain elemental powers. You’re given a bunch of interesting build options from the outset. While the other three, being human characters, came with a bunch of customisation options, the Forged only really had the option of switching out its head. for good measure (I named my alpaca pet Jim Hawkins.

I picked the Forged, of course - and named it B.E.N. Those are the two most basic-looking choices, but then you have the Railmaster - who is accompanied by an actual train as a companion, and the Forged, which is a robot with a cannon in its chest. The Dusk Mage is your typical caster, while the Sharpshooter works best from a distance. Before you can go out there and start slaying zombies, you first have to pick a character class - and all the choices make a good first impression. I didn’t know what to expect, but when the game started off with a Borderlands-like montage of the game’s four playable characters, my hopes rose. I never indulged in Torchlight 3’s early access period, so I started this game with a lot of optimism. It lacks personality and depth to back up its loot-driven gameplay, and most of all: it lacks a good story.

After having spent four months in early access however, Torchlight 3 feels more like a shallow Diablo knock-off than anything close to resembling the real thing. What remains is a game that seeks to recreate what everyone loved about Torchlight 2, which was an action-RPG Diablo-like game with a quirky personality and fun enough loot game. After all these years, Torchlight 3 is finally here, no longer free-to-play and no longer an MMORPG. Announced as Torchlight Frontiers back in 2018, it was meant to be a free-to-play MMORPG, but has since shed many of those MMO-like qualities. The game comes eight years after its predecessor Torchlight 2, developed by Echtra Games after the series’ original developer shut down in 2017. Torchlight 3 has a strange development story.

Torchlight 3 2018