Torchlight 3 didn’t grab me at all like Torchlight 2 did. I tried to enjoy it, I gave it time, but it ultimately felt like a pretty bland by-the-numbers action rpg experience that I probably won’t play again, which is a damned shame. It doesn’t really do anything new or different, and what slight deviations from the genre it does do not bring anything really fun to the genre. I still went through the game once, but couldn’t even do that a second time.
You start the game by picking a class and a relic. Classes all have unique mechanics, which is nice, so you can have a train following you, you can use light/dark magic, you can be an archer with special ‘trinket’ powers, etc. Relics are another layer of passive and active abilities on top of that and they focus on a specific damage and weapon type. This is nice, but having to choose that at the beginning of the game is a bit intense, especially since you don’t know anything about what’s going to be good for your character.
The game is extremely linear; You go from point A to B on the world map and you only have to go back to town a scant number of times to turn in quests and be allowed to continue with little more reasoning than “you need to have X quest completed to move forward”. Some maps are quite big and it can be easy to miss the right exit and then you need to explore for a bit too long, but that’s not that bad because it’s usually fun to just explore, kill monsters and collect loot, right? In Torchlight 3’s case, more or less. Skills lack oomph, even on normal difficulty, with gear suited to my level, some classes just took way too long to defeat basic monsters and an extremely boring amount of time to get through mini bosses, and that sucked all the fun of the game.
You have a bunch of gear slots to equip weapons, armors and pieces of jewelry, and some for your pet as well. It’s a bit tough to find good randomly-generated gear amongst all the stuff that drops and the game doesn’t have any way to tell you if Item X is better than Item Y, and sometimes the pet bugs out and you can’t send them to town to sell any items. Your pet can have a few abilities that you unlock by rescuing more pets, which is nice, but it also bugs and won’t participate in combats at times, which isn’t. The game brings slots to equip legendary item effects like the cube does in Diablo 3, so you also have that other way to customize your character.
This game has some weird systems like the Fort. You can customize a fort with decorations and functional things like chests and upgradable boosts that affect all your characters to provide them with more luck with items, fire resistance and the like but it caps out really quickly and they don’t stack, so I’m not super excited about a +5% item bonus being the endgame here. But otherwise your fort is just a chore. Having to stop killing monsters and finding loot in order to place a new bench or a shiny pile of rocks somewhere isn’t my definition of fun. Furthermore you’ll be able to collect wood and rocks around, but this only serves to craft fort items.
You can also pick contracts that level up as you accumulate fame - usually by completing quests or killing monsters - but unlike the fame system in Torchlight 2, this one is more or less useless and gives mostly cosmetics alongside random items and gold that do not feel any more special than the stuff you find on the ground. I think the end-game is a card-based procedural dungeon thing but after doing it a few times, I couldn’t see the point and stopped.
Torchlight 3 is okay, it’s not great, it doesn’t feel great and there are so many other ARPGs out there that I would rather play. If you can get it for really cheap, maybe it’s worth a try.
