-Quick Review-Torchlight II is a dungeon crawler game that lets you chose to play as a few different classes. The basic concept is the same as nearly all dungeon crawlers: Explore, level up, find gear, beat the boss, rinse and repeat.
-Detailed breakdown review-Story: Oh no! the alchemist is going to bring about the end of the world! You there, unnamed random hero, it's your job to warn everyone, and be just a few steps behind the alchemists defiling touch.
As I implied, you're obviously the hero, the villain you will be trying to catch is known as "the alchemist", whom has been corrupted and destroys all that is in his way.
Game Play: I sense that most dungeon crawlers are time consuming on purpose, I spent a good 30-40 hours before I beat the game, then I kept playing for another 30 hours to get to max level, and at that point I stopped playing.
The whole dungeon crawler genre is criticized for giving us "carpool tunnel", you click, a lot. you do use keys to cast different spells, attacks, and abilities. So for fair warning, you will spend a lot of time in this game clicking.
There is a feature in the game that lets you load up your pet with tons of gear, and send 'em back to town to sell them for you, or buy health potions, basically you never need to go to town to sell gear or buy potions, you're servant pet will do it for you. What does this mean for you, brave adventurer? More dungeon crawling, less vendering trash items! Yay! (Hopefully!)
Achievements: So I hit 76% completion on this game, I've given up trying to actively get 100% completed for achievements, mostly because RNG (Random Number Generator) hates me. I decided getting above 75% was pretty good for a game with 123 achievements, many requiring grinding.
Achievement categories: Beat the game/boss, try doing this, kill this many enemies, open this many of these, do this ____ amount of times, get lucky, play long enough to do this 100,000,000 times. Again, basically I assume that I'll eventually make more progress on this game as I find people who are like "hey, play this with me!" and I'm like "okay, I only need to 3,000 more potions! let's do it!"
Half of these achievements are from just playing the game, so you can enjoy that, but getting 100% will require a lot of play time. Just a warning :)
Price: Torchlight II costs $19.99, I've spent 70 hours playing it. That's definitely worth it. Most people will at least get over 20 hours in the game, even if they're not trying to beat it.
As always, I suggest getting the game on sale or in a humble bundle, but the stand alone price is very much worth it, based on the amount of game time I squeezed out of it.
Conclusion: Story: interesting the first time through, it was very dragged out (not in a bad way, really), Game play: click x1,000,000 (over 9,000 clicks used in the making of this review), Achievements: nothing to write home about, Price: very good price based on the amount of time required to play through the whole game.
This type of game is best suited for people who already know they like dungeon crawlers, I've played several, if you're new to the series this is a great game to start trying it out with! Just be warned there is a lot of clicking involved. Again, this game becomes a 100 times more fun with a friend or two. But, I did play through the whole game solo my first time.