With hills and sand dunes that undulate and offer strategic height advantages (and disadvantages), it feels a lot more natural in design and doesn't just give off the feeling of a wide open space with random packs of enemies roaming around looking for trouble. The level design team has also stepped up their game from the first Torchlight and I'm really impressed with the terrain in Torchlight 2. While this is pretty common, I'm talking about a screen flooded with enemies as the rare occurrence where this game suffers any kind of performance hit. The game runs fantastically well on my two year old machine, only having an occasional drop in framerate when there are tons of enemies on screen. There's a lot of color use that keeps the caves and deserts and forests from feeling too monochromatic, and it's all very detailed, and even has some weather effects to keep things fresh. The character models have been improved tremendously but still keep the style of the original Torchlight, and some of the new bosses have some really fantastic graphical tricks that I wish were used more often throughout the game, the boss of the second act in particular comes to mind. These new enemies and the old ones are looking pretty damn spiffy in the 2012. Along the way players will encounter familiar enemies from the original Torchlight along with a handful of new foes that threaten their adventure at every turn. Though in the case of Torchlight 2, the Alchemist is stealing the essence of Guardians that keep the world in balance, so maybe it's not a total carbon copy. I wasn't expecting a reinvention of the wheel in storytelling, but it came off as a copy to the 'Dark Wanderer' that brought about trouble wherever he went. Honestly it doesn't feel too different from Diablo 2's story, and is perhaps the weakest part of the whole experience.

Told through some nifty drawn cutscenes provided by Klei Entertainment, the three chapters of the game span a roughly twenty hour experience for the first playthrough.

Now that that jab is out of the way, Torchlight 2 follows up shortly after the first game left off, the heart of Ordrak has been taken by The Alchemist, the antagonist to the player's hero who must track down the Alchemist and stop him from harnessing the dark powers the heart possesses.

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