Torchlight III

Limited review, I played through the campaign on 1 character. Apparently only 16% of players make it that far so make of this what you will. On the plus side, the class design is rather good. I played as the Forged, a steam powered robot with a minigun in its chest. Has a resource system where you use an attack to build heat, use an ability to convert heat to steam, use an ability to spend steam. I used my minigun to build heat, an aoe explosion to convert to steam and a sniper shot to spend steam. As you can see I primarily used the Forged's ranged tree but there was another tree that was melee focused. Each class has two trees, not necessarily ranged vs melee for example the Dusk Mage has a light vs shadow tree. There are also relics that each class can choose as a third tree that they share. I chose the Electrode for some shock/attack speed abilities but there's also a fire, blood, poison and frost relic. You gain relic energy using the class' native abilities and once you spend relic energy on relic abilities there's a sort of ultimate relic ability available. With the electrode it was a huge attack speed buff. If attached to a better game, I'd have been interested in trying the Railmaster who has a traincar of turrets follow him about and the Cursed Captain who has a cursed pirate crew at her command and lots of gunpowder abilities. These are cool, unique arpg classes that have a lot of design flourishes to them. Now the downsides. -First this has little to do with Torchlight. Yes there are a few terms namedropped for flavour but were they not used you'd have no clue this was a Torchlight game. -The story is barebones and not very well written. Story may not be a deal breaker for you, it's not like the prior Torchlights were vastly intricate yarns. The plot is either delivered through quest descriptions, audio logs or cutscenes. The latter are just dialogue over drawn panels, some of which aren't even coloured which adds a sense of either laziness or minuscule budget. The last cutscene just has the narrator describe what's happening since there's no dialogue and it'd just be a slideshow of uncoloured sketches otherwise. As for badly written one of the act finales is to stop a minion of the big bad getting their hands on a (namedrop) ember, you defeat the minion and the cutscene has another minion stroll up and take the ember anyway; apparently we either forgot to take the ember with us when we left or conveniently ignored an easily defeatable minion walk up to the macguffin crucial to their plans take it and walk off. -The sound design was rather underwhelming. I remind you that I played a minigun robot, having a local kid make a 'Kchh' gun sound would have more impact that the TL3 sound. The sniper shot was comparable to the sound you make trying to blow a hair off your tongue. The music was ok. -This only occurred once but I had one dungeon that was the same map piece repeated 4 times. It was a short dungeon so it became apparent quickly. Entry, path leading to a circle with a path leading to a circle with a path leading to a circle with a path leading to a circle with a path to the exit. For it's own section here are some of the bugs of Torchlight 3. Is it unplayable? No, however there are enough to make it unpleasant. -Loot will drop through the floor or shoot through the ceiling to unreachability. -You will need to use the Force Move command as characters will stubbornly attack the air where an enemy/destructable item was long after it dies. -The world will 'reset' constantly, there seem to be fixed open world maps with several attached dungeons that the story missions take you into. Frequently after completing the dungeon the open map will repopulate the enemy closets (most enemies are spawned from monster closets) and the map will reshroud meaning that unless you memorised it you need to re-explore the same map over again for your next objective. -There are audiologs found in the world to give some extra story. These are frequently cut off for no reason. Some of these logs are found at fixed points which can be made available again by reloading the area, some are found in chests at random that have no such easy workaround. -Frequently my discovered waypoints became unavailable to teleport to when reloading the game. -The map showing the waypoints repeatedly had an issue where the icons would flicker frenziedly, they weren't 'un-discovered' as above just the icon was unclickable. -The pet's resistances seemed to be bugged, there are pet items that grant invulnerability to the area's element yet my pet would get oneshot frequently. Maybe a bug due to said item also have +resistance to the same element (yay rng) but that's a guess. If you absolutely must play every Torchlight game, if you are tempted by the admittedly cool classes, if you can ignore irritating but not gamebreaking bugs pick it up on sale. If you're looking for a polished arpg perhaps with a good story, shop elsewhere.